At night, Alain Bashung lied. At night, Daria Colonna unpacks all her truths. The requiem of the drunken sirens is the confession of a woman intimate with all the tears that the small hours are pregnant with, but who knows that darkness has always been her most salutary refuge. As a certain Arthur once wrote: dawns are heartbreaking, every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.
Revealed in 2017 with her collection Do not shame your century (Poètes de bush), a monument of criticism of a world from which you will be ejected if you refuse to obey its violence, the writer builds on this first album a a dark universe, at the heart of which love is the most intoxicating of curses and alcohol, a prison of suspicious sweetness of which we would perhaps benefit from being more wary.
Daria Colonna met her death. She even danced with it, she confides on Haut les mains, and her deep, mocking and sensual voice summons hordes of ghosts. Ghosts that she takes the risk of looking into the eyes, even if it means leaving a little of herself there.
Created by the singer-songwriter with her lover, Vince James, The Requiem of the Drunk Sirens borrows its pulse from trip hop, from nu jazz its trumpet streaking the darkness with bursts of light and from hip-hop its superb arrogance. With Daria Colonna, each note seems to be bathed in the dense swirls of too many cigarettes and each moment of bliss seems weighed down by the possibility that yet another bad decision will turn everything upside down. A break-up album, this journey to the end of the Montreal night is also an ode to the immediate pleasures without which one would only have to let one’s ship sink.
Poisonous and lascivious, vulnerable and insolent, cosy and rough; these nine songs (augmented by a spoken interlude by the writer Olivia Tapiero) depict melancholy as a magnificently incurable disease and suffering as an experience that at least has the merit of reminding us that we are indeed alive. It is not surprising that Ariane Moffatt agreed to act as the project’s patron, in addition to lending her voice to Reste pour voir, so much is this record carried by a rare assurance.
A work ranked on the side of the lost, of those who always say yes to one too many drinks and in the soul of whom spleen has pitched its tent, The Requiem of the Drunk Sirens is unlike anything else in Quebec. “And I drink because I want to destroy everything, but I freeze,” whispers Daria Colonna in I Drink. We will see our homes burn, perhaps, but we can congratulate ourselves on having lived fully to the sound of this swaying music, although without ever losing direction.