Wallace Cleaver

"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 does not confine himself to a rap influence, already oscillating within it across all its sub-genres and rhythms; he also explores the terrain of chanson, pop, and spoken-word when necessity catches up with him.

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 is 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 says goodbye to his grandfather, finally closing the chapter of mourning 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