DONALDA – C BEN D’VALEUR
Montreal duo DONALDA just signed to Bonsound for label and management, and “C BEN D’VALEUR” is the first thing they’ve released since. The title is a Québécois idiom, roughly “what a shame,” the kind of phrase you’d use about a missed opportunity. It’s a clever choice for this song specifically, since “valeur” also just means value, and the track spends its runtime working that double meaning: someone failing to see what’s right in front of them, while the word for value sits right there in the title mocking the situation.
The lyric itself is direct about it. “Tu vois pas / Ce qui s’trame devant toi,” Florence Lafontaine and Olivier Martin-Fréchette sing, you don’t see what’s happening right in front of you, and the chorus keeps circling back to the idiom itself, repeated almost like a shrug. Later there’s a line about the bottom of a bottle sitting right in front of both eyes, disappointment with a very specific, recognizable shape to it. It’s a breakup song dressed as a summer track, which tracks with how the duo describes the song generally: bright and danceable on the surface, but built around real disappointment underneath.
Musically it leans into dance, disco, and dub, with the two vocals weaving around each other rather than sitting in a clean lead-and-harmony arrangement. DONALDA describe their wider project as sitting at the meeting point of club intuition and academic rigor. Both members come from backgrounds in contemporary composition and jazz, and you can hear that discipline in how carefully the track is put together even while it sounds loose and carefree.
