South African singer-songwriter Yannick Ilunga, aka Petite Noir, appeared on the Solange Knowles-curated Saint Heron compilation, but even with the alt-R&B scene growing broader as it grows larger, he still doesn’t quite fit in. There are elements of dance music, rap, and rock scattered throughout his debut album, La Vie Est Belle / Life Is Beautiful, but none of those labels quite describe his sound. And while Ilunga frequently incorporates elements of his half-Congolese, half-Angolan ancestry, his music shouldn’t be shoved off into that condescending, colonialist hangover, "world music." "Psychedelically-tinged baroque contemporary African pop with heavy goth undertones" is a mouthful, so "noirwave," a descriptor coined by Ilunga himself, works as well as anything.
Ilunga introduces us to his sound with a literal fanfare. Following an impressionistic, semi-abstract intro that sets up Ilunga’s predilections for complex rhythms and sensual modulated textures, La Vie Est Belle explodes with the chorus to his first single, "Best", which tops an achingly cathartic post-punk hook with an off-kilter brass arrangement that comes in from out of nowhere to flip the song’s buttoned-up synthpop mood on its head. The horns are jarring, bracing, and just dissonant enough to add a manic edge to the song. They sound like maybe they were inspired by Ennio Morricone, or maybe by Neutral Milk Hotel, or maybe by any number of brass bands you can find playing on streets from New Orleans to Kinshasa.
For listeners of a certain persuasion, trying to trace La Vie Est Belle’s sounds back to their influences can be a distractingly entertaining way to appreciate the record, especially when the trail gets as intriguingly ambiguous as that horn part. (Such as Ilunga’s supple, swooningly expressive baritone, which can sound a little like Dave Gahan and a little like David Bowie’s more lucid moments of the '80s.) It’s a tough game to keep up, though. All those different pieces come at you at a rapid pace, and it’s hard to keep an eye on the individual threads when Ilunga keeps pulling your attention back out to the entire tapestry.
In a pop music landscape where eclecticism has become the status quo, Ilunga’s not only pulling from a broader range of sounds than all but a few other players in the game, he’s able to synthesize them into a seamless sonic entity that stands entirely away from the pack. La Vie Est Belle is a gorgeous, complex trip, not just aesthetically but emotionally. By turns, it’s abysmally abject, bravely hopeful, unguarded, canny, sexy, and profound—the kind of richly, messily variegated album that only comes around a few times a year. Yannick Ilunga feels like pop music's future—borderless but deeply rooted, challenging but pleasurable— and La Vie is strong enough to have earned Ilunga the right to call his revolution whatever he wants.
