Stromae
v

I get very scared when an artist announces a "return to roots": in 99% of cases it is a terrible euphemism to avoid declaring themselves dead, without creativity, and devoid of ideas, but in this case, luckily, none of that.

How can Stromae, only on his second album (the debut, "Cheese," delighted/tormented us with the paranoid house of "Alors On Danse") return to his roots? The "back-to-basics" is musical-geographical-folkloric, and Stromae himself, half Belgian and half Rwandan, declared that his next album, mysteriously named "v" (or "Racine Carrée" if you really want to pronounce it somehow), would have "Afro influences, strong percussion, and Cuban sounds mixed with Congolese rumba." If you're thinking something along the lines of world music, you're greatly mistaken, because the young Belgian artist, born Paul Van Haver, seasons these ingredients with a work that is primarily a Francophone collage of house, hip-hop, and dance, and consequently, it is also (moderately) commercial: singles like "Papaoutai"—in French territory really marked the summer of 2013—"Bâtard," or "Formidable," get into your head already on the second listen, but unlike the relentless "Alors On Danse," for which I quickly went from love to hate, the tracks of this convincing album stand up very well to repeated replays, despite all being short, immediate, and lively.

Highlights? The aforementioned "Papaoutai" is a mix of Latin arpeggios and techno keyboards that explodes into a fantastic chorus, "Bâtard" cannot help but make you jump with its Afro-beats, while "Carmen" is a fun dance where Stromae takes on the world of social networks, and finally "Formidable," a more classically hip-hop piece where the rhythms slow down, and the atmosphere becomes melancholic, gives us the icing on the cake of "v". Perhaps, in the end, our Stromae detracts from the album's unity by unnecessarily extending the tracklist, but it is only a small blemish that barely affects the final judgment of this release, the discovery of which was truly a surprise, because it is not at all easy to reinvent yourself on the second album and not end up like a one-hit wonder after a debut single that even the stones have listened to. Despite the title translated as "square root"—pardon the pun—Stromae entertains to the nth degree with a clever and danceable electropop in French: and so it's really the case to say, Alors On Danse!