Do not use Vianney if you are Shawn Mendes or about to become Shawn Mendes. Ask your doctor if Vianney is right for you.
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[3.50]
Will Adams: Oh God, the Shawn Mendes… it’s spreading.
[4]
Iain Mew: This comes very close to falling into a terrible Passenger-shaped hole, but the careful and sparing build in the arrangement at least gives a bit of life and variety that the pedestrian melody and vocal can’t reach.
[4]
Thomas Inskeep: Vianney delivers a pretty brutal ballad (its title translates as “I Am Leaving”) superbly, with more emotion in one verse than you get from the Yank acoustics-and-voice boy brigade (cf. Mayer, Mraz, et.al.) across entire albums. It’s pretty obvious to me why this recently hit #2 in France: people reacted to it. You might, too, regardless of your language proficiency.
[7]
Cédric Le Merrer: When he’s not on national TV defending police officers raping my fellow French citizens, Vianney makes shitty French variété. Thank god my aesthetics and politics agree on his case.
[0]
Cassy Gress: I looked up the lyrics before I heard this, and my brain by default read the opening lines like a rollicking limerick: “J’ai TROque mes CLIQUES et mes CLAQUES / conTRE des cloQUES et des FLAQUES.” Obviously I don’t speak French. The first two minutes of the song cycle repeatedly through i, VI and VII, with a verse and chorus that melodically sound very similar to each other. Someone thought that adding more instruments = emotion, so they added acoustic guitar, bass drum, backing singers, maracas, etc on each loop, until by the end it is rather loud but it’s still doing the exact same basic chord loop and melody. Vianney’s vocal contribution is not much to write home about either, because just like mistaking instrumentation for intensity, he mistakes a shaky vibrato for tension. He also sings maybe seven notes in the whole song, spending most of his time safely in the B♭3-D4 range. I’m not sure my initial limerick guess was that far off.
[3]
Ryo Miyauchi: It all unfolds like a movie, Vianney says, and so does “Je m’en Vais.” You can feel where the beat of this love drama will go next from a mile away: give it a minute and the strings will come rising. And Vianney sings like an amateur actor expressing heartbreak. It’s only the idea of it, and it stinks of performance.
[3]