If you ask me, indie singer/songwriters around the world have been doing a pretty good job of weathering the storm of discord and unpredictability 2020 has thrown in our direction, and for evidence supporting this, I point you towards none other than the new record from Canada’s Sébastien Lacombe, Fly, and its lead single “My Thousand Dollar Car.” When listening to any of the nine songs included in Fly, Lacombe doesn’t try to reference current affairs with inarticulate prose – he lets the tone of his harmonies make the message clear to us, abandoning the concerns of a “mainstream player” in favor of simply being himself.
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The video for “My Thousand Dollar Car” steers the audience away from the elements of a standard retrospective piece – in all actuality, both the lyrics and the stylization of the beat in this single make it far more of a confessional than an anthem about clinging to the past, as would be the case in a typical scenario. I don’t know whether or not Lacombe was deliberately trying to get away from the status quo with his compositional duality in this LP, but all the same, songs like this one elevate his profile well beyond where I had thought it was prior to hearing this latest release.
Fly has the full-bodied feel that I didn’t get out of any of Sébastien Lacombe’s previous work when I went back through his complete discography in preparation for this review, but I don’t think he’s made a complete departure from the artistic core that made his earliest of recordings attractive to critics like myself. He’s still touching on the folky Canadian themes he always has in “So You Say,” “When the Devil Rides with Me,” the title number and “I Am Who I Am,” only now he’s making room for definitively alternative material like “Mr. Suicide Man” as well.
APPLE MUSIC: https://music.apple.com/us/album/fly/1500940570
He’s still going to have some more work ahead of him in the studio if his ultimate mission is to locate a path into the hearts of a stable American audience, but right now, I don’t think a critic that refers to Fly as anything other than a big milestone for Sébastien Lacombe knows his music very well. The evolution has been slow but always steady if you trace his career back on Spotify, and in 2020, it would seem he’s hit some kind of a creative booster that could be enough to put him over the top with all the right people.
Jodi Marxbury