La Femme
Lo-fi lolita-surfpop heroes La Femme just released a new EP with four songs. Well, three new tracks and a rework of their underground hit ‘Sur la Planche’. The upbeat title track La Femme is sung by one of the various filles La Femme enlists to sing. A video is coming up too. According to this pic on their Facebook, it’s gonna look…different. The other songs are the Velvet Undergroundsy ‘Hypsoline’, with it’s unstable organ and tribal rhythm, that ends in a duet. There’s the bilingual ‘It’s Time To Wake Up’ that sounds like something Nini Raviolette forget to record back in the cold wave 80s. And a faster, streamlined version of Sur La Planche. It’s sleazy, it’s sexy, it’s good.
La Femme – La Femme
UPDATE:
And here’s that video, featuring La Femme and Hypsoline:
Are Girlfriends Electric?
Try to voice this name, and then try again: Evelyne Ranaivorarivony. According to Discogs, it’s the real name of Nini Raviolette, who released her one and only single in 1980: Suis-Je Normale?, a minimalist, freezoid stun-gun of a song that also opened 2004’s So Young But So Cold sampler. Now the song can be found again on Change the Beat, a brand new compilation celebrating the history of the legendary Celluloid label, still clinically cold, clinically disturbed, and still waiting for the right answer.
Nini Raviolette – Suis-Je Normale?
La Grande Sexy Sophie
Sexy Boy by Air, covered by La Grande Sophie plus strings. Ooh la la, there’s an intented pun. This cover’s from a just released EP by LGS, featuring a couple of her own songs with said string section, plus this cover. Not the first time Sexy Boy’s been redone. Apart from the almost obligatory Top 40 coverband variations (Vitamin String Quartet et al), there are a few unusual, yet good covers. A guitaristic one by Franz Ferdinand, one by youth choir Scala and an offbeat Bertrand Burgalat-reprise.
La Grande Sophie – Sexy Boy
Bertrand Burgalat – Sexy Boy
Franz Ferdinand – Sexy Boy
Scala – Sexy Boy
And 99 pink bubble bath sets for the most girlish version go to:
Le Larron, Lisa Portelli
Never heard of raspy rapper/smooth talker Le Larron before, but kooky Lisa Portelli (pictured), she’s a regular here. Lisa and Le Larron sang two duets for an EP by the latter. ‘Je t’aime is the best of the two, you can check that out below. Les yeux verts is cool too. Listen on Soundcloud HERE
Le Larron, Lisa Portelli – Je t’aime
Lafayette + Liza Manili video
Free Jupiter remix:
Deux Filles
“The short, mysterious career of the aptly named female French duo Deux Filles is bookended by tragedy. Gemini Forque and Claudine Coule met as teenagers at a holiday pilgrimage to Lourdes, during which Coule’s mother died of an incurable lung disease and Forque’s mother was killed and her father paralyzed in a grisly auto accident. The two teens bonded over their shared grief and worked through their bereavement with music. However, after recording two critically acclaimed albums and playing throughout Europe and North America, Forque and Coule disappeared without a trace in North Africa in 1984 during a trip to visit Algiers, where Forque had lived from birth to the age of five. Theories from abduction and murder to a planned disappearance to spontaneous human combustion have been floated, but in the ensuing years, not a trace of the duo has turned up except for a mysterious letter purportedly written by Coule claiming that the pair journeyed to India on a spiritual quest, only to meet with further hardships. Indeed, the short and terribly unhappy lives of Forque and Coule are at the root of the small but fervent cult following the mysterious duo have gained since their disappearance, not least because the placid, largely instrumental music on the duo’s albums betrays no hint of the sorrow that framed their personal lives.
This would be a terribly sad story if a word of it were true. In reality, Deux Filles were Simon Fisher Turner, former child star/teen idol and future soundtrack composer, and writer/producer Colin Lloyd Tucker. Turner and Tucker left an early incarnation of The The in 1981 to pursue another musical direction. Turner claims that the idea of Deux Filles came to him in a dream, and he and Tucker strictly maintained the fiction throughout the duo’s career. Not only did they pose in drag for the album covers, the duo once even played live without the audience realizing that the tragic French girls on-stage were actually a pair of blokes from south London having a giggle. Deux Filles released two albums through Turner and Tucker’s Papier Mache label, 1982’s Silence & Wisdom and 1983’s Double Happiness. After that, the duo scrapped the Deux Filles concept and released two ambient pop albums as Jeremy’s Secret.”
The two DF-albums are re-released. Mostly instrumental, but there’s one intriguing French track:
Deux Filles – L’Intrigue
Daprinski
Daprinski could well be a FillesSourires-regular. Benoit d’Aprigny (his real name) is from Saint-Lo and loves ‘ces femmes qui murmurent à votre oreille et vous touchent en plein coeur’, like Anna Karina and Jeanne Moreau. Music-wise, he’s very much inspired by Michel Colombier, Philippe Sarde, J-C Vannier and of course Serge Gainsbourg. Last year, an instrumental track appeared on a compilation (Spotify-link) which sounds like an unfolding of a masterplan, a revelation of a modus operandi. On the EP, Benoit sings, and gets help from quite a few of those ‘femmes qui murmerent à votre oreille’: Loane, Chat, Elsa Motin and one ‘Emilie M’. She’s the gal who backs him up on the plushy Des X, pun very much intended. More here.
Daprinski & Emilie M – Des X