Le p'tit Jézu (F)

CD "Martinengo" (Sterne-NRW | STE 265922)

Info | French songwriting has after all many surprises in store. Le p‘tit Jézu's third album, Martinengo, is a striking and unexpected example. It's a solidly musical album, carefully made but not superfluous, overflowing with a rare honesty. No pathos, no bragging, just simple music made up with heaps of skill and sensitiveness.
Piero Moioli, from Metz but with deliciously conspicuous Italian origins, who was lead singer and guitarist in a formely forefront ska group (Skaferlatine), released the first eponymous album of his project in 2000. After he was noticed in the press - particularly in Télérama - and in the music business – during the Francofolies, after being involved in Montreurs d'Ours, a project with 8 partners including Zézé Mago, Louisville and Le p'tit Jézu, he released his second opus in 2003. It is entitled « Une Nuit à Sarrebruck » (One Night in Sarrebruck) and it features his colourful I Macaroni. It's a set of songs impregnated with his roots and Italian immigration in Lorraine, to which Martinengo, named after his grandfather's native village, is a fine sequel. On the menu: refined singing, a tendency to pop, sounds dropping here and there, a surprisingly warm melancholy and a welcoming and cosy universe. These compositions, where clever texts go along with delightful instrumentation, might remind you of Acrobates, for the arrangements and the finely wrought minimalism, of Mickey 3D, but without the grating laidback irony – though Gilles reaches its goals at depicting modern hell. It might sometimes remind you of Cali for the voice but without the overflowing cruelty, of Manu Chao in Je te rappelle, but without the wearisome phrasing and the homemade electro. And yet whether he sings about women (Claire, Nada termina, A nos vies sous-marines), or in Italian, Piero stands up against these echoes effortlessly and reveals a very special personality: discreet, radiant- like in the sunny Aux Abois, and full of humility and goodness. This open-mindedness is exemplified at the end of the album: for 15 minutes, a crowd of anonymous people take up the chorus, made of emotional worn out voices, children's voices, some clumsy, some off the beat, some industrious or giggling or stammering. Le p'tit Jézu keeps on carving out a place, far from today's standards in French music. It's a record you should savour with care, lest its underlying fragility might break. An intimate and subtly moving album.