Marie-Élaine Thibert is a Montreal singer with a strong voice, which is reminiscent of Barbara Streisand’s. She first came to public attention when she belted out Jacques Brel’s technically difficult song “La quête”, on Quebec’s major talent show, Star Académie. The stadium-show-tunes kind of stuff is not really my kind of music, but I can appreciate the talent here. Quebec seems to grow highly professional mainstream singers as easily as British Columbia grows marijuana. There seems to be an endless supply. But only a few of them, such as Céline Dion, break out into the rest of the world. On the strength of this album, which has confident showmanship, I would guess that she will make it out, probably first in Europe. I haven’t heard all her second album, Comme ça, but it has a hit in a cover of Monique Leyrac’s old standard “Pour cet amour”, a duet with Chris deBurgh (a translation of “Lonely Sky”), and a very fine, subtle song I’ve heard online, “Les herbes hautes”.
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