Wallace Cleaver

'Marcel' is an earthquake of an album, an intimate explosion where Wallace Cleaver translates the simultaneous flowering of musical achievement and personal incompleteness.

The artist is not confined to rap influence, already oscillating within it through all its subgenres and rhythms, he also explores the territory of song, pop, spoken-word when necessity catches up with him.

Wallace Cleaver is accompanied by his partner PR's music, a pianist with sometimes floating and airy sonorities, but also heavy and brutal when urgency must be expressed.

It is a record traversed by the passage of time; the one that gives life, when his niece is born, and the one that fades, when he says goodbye to his grandfather, finally closing the chapter of grief begun on Merci.

There is in Marcel the poetic translation of a generational loop: someone leaves, someone arrives, and at the centre, Wallace, who tells the fragile role of a man growing up between the two. Marcel marks the album of flowering.

The one where Wallace fully asserts himself, where his artistic identity finally appears in its definitive form, result of a decade of research, doubts, 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 vacillating, but proud, facing the work one becomes. © Asterios.