Wallace Cleaver - Marcel Tour

"Marcel" is an earthquake of an album, an intimate deflagration where Wallace Cleaver translates the simultaneous blossoming of a musical achievement and a personal incompleteness. The artist doesn't confine himself to rap influences, already oscillating within its sub-genres and rhythms; he also explores the realms of chanson, pop, and spoken-word when necessity calls. Wallace Cleaver is accompanied by the music of his partner PR, a pianist whose sounds are sometimes ethereal and airy, but also heavy and brutal when urgency needs to be conveyed. It's a record traversed by the passage of time; the time that gives life, when his niece is born, and the time that fades, when he bids farewell to his grandfather, finally closing the chapter of grief begun on Merci. In Marcel, there is the poetic translation of a generational loop: someone leaves, someone arrives, and in the middle, Wallace, who recounts this fragile role of a man growing between the two. Marcel marks the album of blossoming. The one where Wallace fully asserts himself, where his artistic identity finally appears in its definitive form, the result of a decade of research, doubts, and reconstruction. His pen, his voice, his universe, everything converges. The music testifies to his experience in rap, but also to his trials as a man: son, uncle, grandson, friend, artist. Marcel is a mirror held up to oneself, a snapshot of the moment when one stands, wavering but proud, facing the work one is becoming.

© Asterios