Chalumeau ’s debut album, Blue, makes an immediate impression. The duo, Katherine Bergeron and Butch Rovan, are Brown University professors who step into the role of musicians with striking confidence. Over eighteen months, they shaped a record that uses genre as a palette, creating a vivid exploration of love and its many contradictions.
The album opens with “Homecoming,” a track that explores a fragile promise of love as sanctuary, a promise that slips away as the song unfolds. From there, the record widens its scope. “Lies” smolders with a smoky jazz-noir edge, “Candombe” bursts with Afro-Latin rhythm, “Hide” punches hard with rock grit, and “La Vérité” sways with bossa nova groove. By the time the title track arrives, the listener is enveloped in a ballad that crystallizes the meaning of Blue: melancholy tinged with wisdom and creative openness.
At its core, Blue is an album about love, but not in the easy, sentimental sense. These ten tracks dive into resentment, devotion, regret, betrayal, loss, and reconciliation. The political and societal urgency of “No Common Ground” sits comfortably alongside the grief-stricken restraint of “My Hands Are Tied” and the resilient optimism of “Never Give Up.” The closing track, “You Can Count on Me,“ serves as a tender anthem to loyalty, offering a note of hope after a journey through shadow and light. Although many songs from the album were released before its debut, on the record, arranged in a specific sequence, they reveal new dimensions, drawing listeners deeper into their meanings and sound.
What makes Blue even more impressive is its DIY ethos. Bergeron and Rovan wrote, performed, produced, mixed, and mastered every song themselves. The intimacy of that process is audible in the finished work. Each harmony, each rhythmic shift, feels deliberate and deeply personal. It feels meticulously crafted, almost like a PhD study. Much of the songwriting emerged from Bergeron’s solitary walks in Rhode Island, with melodies surfacing in motion before being sculpted in the studio with Rovan’s keen ear for arrangement.
Chalumeau celebrated the release at The Met in Pawtucket with a nine-piece band, horns, and backup singers included. The performance underscored just how layered these songs are, transforming an intimate project into a communal experience.
Blue is a debut that feels seasoned, even timeless. It resists trends and opts instead for substance, crafting songs that linger long after the final note. Chalumeau may be new to the recording world, but with Blue, they have already delivered one of the most daring records of the year, filled with sharp life observations.
