Dion pushes through her sorrow on new album
Céline Dion 1/2
(out of 4) Encore un soir (Sony)
In a recent interview with The Canadian Press in Montreal, Québecoise diva Céline Dion both asserted that her forthcoming francophone album, Encore un soir, would not be a sad one and that she already has a tune written by Pink titled “Recovering” set aside for her next Englishlanguage record.
Dion, then, would seem to be moving on as best she can from the loss to cancer of her husband, René Angélil, in January and returning to work with a vengeance. And though there are no songs explicitly about recovering from the death of a loved one on Encore un soir, it does seem to be putting a brave face on things and making a point of carrying on.
There are songs about surrounding oneself with the solace of family, about the comforting permanence of the stars, about staring at the sky with a child, about finding hope and rediscovering wonder and “my power.”
This being a Céline Dion album — her 26th since 1981, actually — most of it is windblown, unsubtle and not terribly tasteful, although in fairness her French records do tend to be slightly more tasteful than her English ones. That’s not to say that Céline Dion en français can’t be unbearably florid, but it tends to feel, well, less florid in her native tongue.
So, yes, a lot of symphonic bluster and stridently “strong” arrangements to accompany Dion’s life-affirming declamations here on cuts like “L’étoile” and “Ma faute,” the Sia-esque “Tu Sauras” and the almost maddeningly upbeat “Les yeux au ciel,” some of which works and a lot of which sounds very much the same the longer this very long album wears on.
It’s like being slapped awake when the cheeseball-electro dance track “A vous” roars out of nowhere towards the end of the record alongside a garish faux-country anthem called “Ma force,” where clearly someone at the label decided at the last minute they wanted to hit a couple more radio formats with this thing. The “deluxe” edition also appends a remastered version of “Trois heures vingt,” one of the Dion songs Angélil selected, before he died, to be played at his own funeral at Notre-Dame Basilica.
The title track is the only song here written (in partnership with longtime Dion collaborator Jean-Jacques Goldman) expressly for Angélil, and it’s actually rather good. Dion — who also lost her brother Daniel to cancer in January within days of her husband’s death — has never sounded more wounded and three-dimensionally human on a record, going from laughter to breakdown and covering every emotion in between in 4:23. It’s a perfectly timed tour de force, and an “oh yeah” reminder that, behind the schmaltz and the overproduction that come hand-in-hand with her recordings, Dion is a really, really good singer.
When it’s simply Dion singing with relatively little dressing, as she does on a gorgeous cover of Daniel Picard’s “A la plus haute branche” soundtracked by nothing but piano, acoustic guitar and a whiff of harmonica, Encore un soir goes beyond “bearable” to “lovely.” It makes you wonder what she might do with a stripped-down acoustic album and the right material. Or an album entirely of vintage Québecois covers.
Dion does as nice a job of Robert Charlebois’s smoky classic “Ordinaire” as she does of the Picard song here, investing it with impressively theatrical character but then at the same time managing to sound impossibly real again when she utters a line that translates as “When I sing, I feel better.”
No doubt she does.