Alain Bashung
L'Imprudence

Having regained great success and a strong connection with his audience, Alan Bashung returned to the scene in 2002, surprising everyone once again with the most ambitious album of his career. Even though Fantaisie Militaire, with its underlying pessimism and widespread gloom, allowed some flashes of light, L'imprudence is a completely dark, cryptic, and edgy album. In many ways, it probably represents the absolute pinnacle of Bashung's career.

The musical part is further enriched, refining the experiments of the previous album with arrangements of great refinement and sensuality. The pervasive presence of strings, orchestrated by the film composer Ludovic Bource, is undoubtedly decisive in giving further depth to the dark and claustrophobic sounds of tracks like Je me dore and Noir du monde. In parallel, a rhythm section is provided with great creative freedom, filled with cult names from contemporary jazz and rock, including Arto Lindsay (one of the fathers of the New York No Wave scene), Mino Cinelu (a French percussionist who had already worked with Miles Davis and Weather Report), and, last but not least, Marc Ribot, a historical collaborator of Tom Waits and one of my absolute favorite guitarists. And I would say there's not much more to add.

Jean Fauque's wonderful lyrics here reach their maximum expression and also a greater centrality within Bashung's musical structures, which in the more rock albums sometimes end up compressing and suffocating a bit the imaginative and evocative power of the French poet. This greater attention to the lyrics gives life to absolutely unique tracks like Tel, where the music is constantly suspended and carried away by the word (it is no coincidence that it's the album where Bashung most extensively uses recitatives, as in the tribal and hallucinatory Jamais d'autre que toi).

Usually, in reviews, I tend not to exaggerate in my judgments, and therefore I honestly want to emphasize the greatness of this album, where the combination of musical, lyrical, and executive components reaches heights never surpassed by Bashung, and that many significant European songwriters have never even thought of scaling.
In Italy, the album isn’t available on various streaming sites, and on YouTube, you can't find more than two or three tracks, while paradoxically, it is very easy to find in a physical version. Perhaps during the listening, you will sometimes feel estranged, a bit tossed about, but never disappointed, because great albums can never disappoint. And L'imprudence is one of them.