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MACH 6
(EastWest/WEA France)
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The sense of adventure has long since fallen out of the rap and music of Claude M’barali, a/k/a MC Solaar. What remains, here as in his magisterial Cinquième As (Fifth Ace), his fifth CD, is a willingness to use and reuse, in shifting combinations, the melodies, atmospherics, slow beats, vocal choruses, and jazz permutations that he’s always fancied. Solaar’s quiet-man raps talk to you as you stroll through Paris and through the city’s metropolis of sounds. Because Solaar’s big city is both a no man’s land and a series of neighborhoods in which he knows lots of faces by first name (and talks to them, in their local argot), he makes his music soothing sweet and wistfully sad at the same time. Still, it takes a pessimistic listener to read too much into this CD’s lonely or unsettling moment when it’s offset by life-is-good sentiments smiled, exulted, teased, harmonized, and relaxed upon in several overlapping languages: "La vie est belle," the dreamy "Today Is a Good Day" (a translation of and almost a personal commentary upon Mylene Farmer’s recent hit "C’est une belle journée"), "Hijo de Africa," "Jumelles," the suavely smug "Cash Money," a cutely Caribbean "Bling bling," with its children’s chorus led by Solaar himself. Best of all is the beboppish, strutting "Je connais mon role," a song that sums up Solaar’s music and his statement of purpose. And presence.
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