WOODKID – The Golden Age
01. The Golden Age
02. Run Boy Run
03. The Great Escape
04. Boat Song
05. I Love You
06. The Shore
07. Ghost Lights
08. Shadows
09. Stabat Mater
10. Conquest Of Spaces
11. Falling
12. Where I Live
13. Iron
14. The Other Side
It seems like the whole pop world has been waiting for this to happen since the name WOODKID popped up for the first time. After directing several music videos for popular artist like LANA DEL RAY, TAYLOR SWIFT or KATY PERRY and releasing his successful Iron EP in 2011, the time for Yoann Lemoine alias WOODKID finally has come to present his high anticipated debut record The Golden Age. But how did the multilayer video artist Lemoine become the great pop artist WOODKID?” “The first time that I made music for one of my short films was when I started to artistically understand the connection between my sound and my videos, and that it was working well. I just started producing tracks in connection with my sensibilities as a director, I kept them cinematic of course and very connected to my visuals.” commented the French musician in an interview.
And so the intensely emotional (as WOODKID himself calls his music) longplayer The Golden Age emerged. Incredibly the videoproducer managed to connect orchestral music with pop tunes. Basicly not something entire new but he managed to bring these two worlds together in a new way – it almost feels like he created something totally new, something that has never existed in this form before. And WOODKID has an explanation for that-certainly.”I knew that if I was going to do a music project it had to be different to anything else that was out but also on some level it needed to be acceptable. So we decided to make pop music with everything but pop instruments, there’s no guitar, no drums, no bass in the album. We went for classical piano and orchestral sounds and beats that were more like percussion and we produced the album like an electronic album. “
“The Golden Age is over” sings the French artist in the albums opener. But it doesn’t feel like the golden age is over for WOODKID. It seems like it is just starting now. The connection between Yoann Lemoines beautiful voice (sometimes comparabale to Antony Hegarty from ANTONY AND THE JOHNSONS), the fragile piano melodies and the emotional orchestra instruments is simply stunning. It is very conspicuous that Lemoines isn’t only a musician but a video artist – most of the songs on The Golden Age could be part of a movie soundtrack. Defenitely a good characteristic for the album which perfectly combines digital sounds with organic instruments.
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Just take the impressive Run Boy Run – nominated for the Best Music Video at the 2013 Grammy Awards – or the highly classical pieces The Great Escape and The Shore. I Love You – and its video – are simply breathtaking and Shadows and Failing two characterful, cosmical instrumental oeuvres. And not to forget – WOODKID presumably popular song Iron. To shoot it’s video he collaborated with the splendid English model Agyness Deyn and furthermore the track was featured on the soundtrack for several medias, such as the celebrated Tarantino movie Django Unchained or the TV series Teen Wolf. Even a whole fashion collection is inspired by this masterpiece- Dior Homme’s Fall-Winter 2013 collection A Soldier On My Own bears a line from it as it’s name. The wonderful track lives from heroic winding instrumentation and great lyrical verses (as actually all fourteen songs do) ,for instance” The sound of iron shocks is stuck in my head/ The thunder of the drums dictates/ The rhythm of the falls/ the number of dead’s /The rising of the horns, ahead” . An almost too perfect combination.
WOODKID truly captures the Zeitgeist with his briliant debut record The Golden Age. He shows that the connection between pop, orchestra and video art works perfectly. And Yoann Lemoine is a real revolutionist. Yeah, big words but we can’t really thinkg of anybody who ever created this kind of sound before. It’s right time and right place for the man from France. And if he keeps on developing himself as quick as so far he probably will become one of the greatest artists of the next years.
