Tess, she of Dutch chanson combo Tess & Les Moutons Magnifiques, lend her voice to the electropop experiments of Dutch producer L’Oeil de Moscou. This is the Elli & Jacno-worthy result:
Musique
Coeur de Pirate at Massey Hall
Mark Sullivan writes:
Massey Hall, Canada’s most prestigious music venue (in Toronto), which dates from 1894, hosted Coeur de Pirate on 31 May 2014. A 28-minute film of highlights of her concert has now been released on-line.
Any one who doubts that Béatrice Martin is the supreme writer and performer of popular music in her generation should look at this. Shot in black-and-white from several angles, and with perfect acoustic recording, this film takes us far beyond the thousands of amateur recordings of CdP that crowd Youtube. As amateur filming was not permitted, this is a unique record of a completely professional performance, with elegant bilingual introductions. It is so good that one can only hope that the full concert, which must have included as many songs again, will be issued on DVD.
There is a voice-over by Béatrice at the start, and the audience is seen entering over the sound of the first track. The songs shown are
Le Long de large
Francis
Ensemble
Golden Baby
Adieu
Place de la République
Comme les Enfants
Berceuse is played over the closing credits.
It is notable that (as the credits show) Coeur de Pirate has kept all four of her band for the whole six years of her career so far – Renaud Bastien, rhythm guitar (her lead musician), Emmanuel Éthier, lead guitar, Alexandre Gauthier, bass, and Julien Blais, drums. No wonder the quality is so high.
Stephanie Blanchoud
Stephanie Blanchoud is a Swiss-Belgian actress who released one album and an EP, but somehow managed to stay under the all-seeing eye(s) of this blog. Her new album’s on the way, this is the first single featuring Belgian superstar Daan, who sounds a bit like Bryan Ferry in this duet. Cool video too:
Listen to snippets of the upcoming album HERE
Lola Dutronic
Something old, something new, something borrowed and something very blue from everyone’s favourite bilingual transatlantic electronic pop duo of Toronto-based Richard Citroen and vocalist (and Dusseldorf resident) Stephanie B.
The song is available from the pair’s Bandcamp site…with promise of a new album later this year!
Robi
Chloé Robineau’s debut album “L’hiver et la Joie” – a stunningly atmospheric and at times dark and brooding, minimalist indie-pop album populated with synth keyboards and throbbing basslines – deservedly featured amongst 2013’s year-listed albums. And now a couple of years later Chloé – or Robi – as she is better known, is back with a brand new album “La Cavale”, that from the opening bars of “L’éternité” reveals a collection of songs which share the same dark and brooding themes as its predecessor and is again populated with minimalist synthesiser keyboards, stark bass lines and Robi’s deliberately monotonic yet hypnotically seductive vocals.
Yet you also start to notice the subtle changes that Robi manages to convey to the song with just some deft inflections to her voice, added guitar, cello and what sounds like orchestral horns (but which I suspect is just programmation) that provide both added substance and an analogue mellowness; the inherent coldness and unforgivingness of industrial synth-pop is replaced by a yielding warmth. Indeed, while the overall tone of this album is decidedly melancholic there are also some very clever touches displayed here -an unexpected sensuality to Robi’s voice on “Nuit de fête” that is expertly framed by the song’s melody, while “Danser” oozes romance and passion – a solitary spotlight following two dancers as they pirouette across a deserted dance floor.
The more that I’ve been listening to this album over the past week, so I’m convinced that “La Cavale” shares a kindred spirit with La Féline’s “Adieu L’Enface” and nowhere more so than with the haunting “A cet endroit” with its heavily reverbed guitar, analogue synths and melodic chorus.
“La Cavale” is a totally captivating and assured album, perfect for driving along a desolate two-lane flat top, searing headlights illuminating the dark, waiting for the moment daylight rescues us from the night’s grasp…
Christine remix
Merdenomdedieu this is great. Christine & the Queens in the Paradis (these guys) remix.
Petite Meller
A French artist that’s gaining attention in Holland (and beyond) right now is Petite Meller (real name Sivan Meller). She makes nouveau jazzy pop, wears heavy lolita-make up and sings like a young Vanessa Paradis. In fact, she covered VP’s Joe Le Taxi. Before going solo, she was part of Terry Poison, a band that was under my radar during their existence. Dirty electropop song Comme Ci Comme Ca was a hit, apparently.
To quote The Guardian:
“Don’t be fooled by the cutesy hiccup or the flirtation with Lolita chic, though – Ms Meller is a philosophy postgraduate currently studying for her masters. She’s a big fan of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and his theories on the libidinal subconscious (who isn’t?) as well as Deleuze and Guattari and their exploration of the rhizomatic principle. A reality TV dunce she is not. She’s into French New Wave cinema and the Italian masters (Pasolini, Fellini, Visconti) and she even based the video to her single Backpack on Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou and L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot. In it, she says, she and the director “were trying to capture aesthetic recollections of my childhood… [when] I was discovering my sexuality for the first time.”
Somehow I feel Petite Meller is stealing Yelle’s shine in making babypop electro, but current single Baby Love is undeniably infectious AND has a great video with giraffes:
If only she sang in French
What a cool song. What a great voice. As if Françoise Hardy recorded with Velvet Underground, produced by Joe Meek. Shame it’s not in French….
RIP Rod McKuen
Singer Rod McKuen passed away recently. So we’re reposting this ode to Rod, written by Sky, posted earlier on this blog:
There probably will be no music at my real funeral. I’d rather prefer a reading of the last three pages of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle’s Le feu follet. However, at my fictitious funeral this All Saints’ Monday, my future ghost will engulf in the kitsch grandeur of the English version of Le Moribond. Jacques Brel’s 1961 original is a bit too snappy for my tastes, and Terry Jacks’s 1974 smash hit adaptation – originally to be recorded by the Beach Boys (!) – well, let’s put a shroud over it. The ultimate version is undoubtedly by Rod McKuen, close Brel friend and translator of many of his lyrics. His rugged-voice US version, adapted first by the Kingston Trio in 1964, sentimentalizes Brel’s chanson for sure, and simultaneously transforms it into big-scope American death disc drama. Paradoxically, the starfish on the beach granted him a nice bit of immortality.
Fanny Bloom
Our favorite kooky Quebecoise just released an EP with music she composed for a ‘pièce de théatre’ called Constellations. Read more here. The title track is the only real song: