Under the Radar (11): Cristina Branco

  • Posted on 25/01/2012
  • /Under Musique

When a literary heavyweight and Nobel Prize candidate like António Lobo Antunes writes lyrics for you, you’re playing Pop’s pantheon. On her 11th album Fado/ Tango (also released as Não Ha Só Tangos em Paris, for whatever reasons), Portuguese fadista Cristina Branco fuses the solemn Fado heritage of predecessors like Amália Rodrigues with Tango’s seductiveness, also frenchifying her spectrum with a fine cover version of Brel’s Les Désespérés, and a jaunty musical setting of L’Invitation au Voyage from Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. High in the charts in Portugal last spring, this one found far too few listeners in the rest of the world. Bandoneons rule!

Cristina Branco – Les Désespérés
Cristina Branco – L’Invitation au Voyage

심규선 (Lucia)

  • Posted on 25/01/2012
  • /Under Video

A tip from a fellow ‘zuchtmeisjes’ (or fille sourire) fan Cor Hospes, this video by Korean singer Lucia. No idea what she’s singing about, no clue if there’s an album (I could only find a single and a few guestspots) and ok, not everything is as breezy as this one. But this one’s great. The only K-Pop I know sounds like this, so Lucia is quite a difference.

Juliette Gréco & Melody Gardot

  • Posted on 24/01/2012
  • /Under Musique

The everlasting Mme Gréco (b. 1927) is back, with another album. Featuring younger stars, like Marc Lavoine, Féfé and blonde Jersey girl Melody Gardot. Together they sing Sous les ponts de Paris, a standard dating back to 1914. Ponts, or bridges, are the recurring theme on Ça ce traverse et c’est beau, with covers and new songs. Like fellow living chanson legend Charles Aznavour, her voice isn’t what it used to be – Gréco talks or growls more than she sings. Yet, she’s still standing. One has to bow.

Juliette Gréco & Melody Gardot – Sous les ponts de Paris

Under the radar (10)

Serge Gainsbourg’s L’Homme à tête de chou is the underrated masterpiece in his catalogue, lesser known then ‘Melody Nelson’ but certainly not a lesser album. Just before he died, Alain Bashung worked on a ballet about the man with the cauliflower head. The videos for the ballet look interesting, the album was a bit of a letdown to be honest. Yet this is a great video for Bashung’s version of Variations sur Marilou. What I didn’t know, is that Serge-soundalike Rodolphe Burger recorded a live tribute of ‘Tête de chou’ in 2006. With help from Mick Harvey, Jacques Higelin and Fred Poulet. Last year, a registration popped up on Bandcamp, featuring extra tracks like a duet with Jane Birkin. I can’t believe it’s not Serge singing there.

Also on Bandcamp, an album by the British jazz band Les Effrontés. It says release-date February 4 2012, but you can stream and download it already. The band started out as a Jacques Brel coverband, with Paris-born Tiffany Schellenberg on vocals. They do two Gainsbourg-covers, the best is Black Trombone. The song, one of my favourite SG-tunes, gets a tango make-over that really works.

Rodolphe Burger & Jane Birkin – Dépression au Dessus du Jardin (See the original version by Cathérine Deneuve, and this version by Serge himself)

Les Effrontés – Black Trombone
(See Serge’s original here)

Under the Radar (9): Guillotines & Spadassins

  • Posted on 23/01/2012
  • /Under Musique

No French girls this time unfortunately, but France does have a very vivid garage rock scene, with a lot of 60’s influence. And that is what we like here as well, so in this “under the Radar” time for two releases by French Bands without female singers.
Les Guillotines, from the Parisian suburbs,  released a single in 2011. They are said to be a garage rock band, but one of the rougher kind. B-side track L’absinthe”, remind me of French punk-bands form the eighties (Think Les Olivensteins). The a-side (“L’Aube”) has a bit more 60’s vibe, so that is the one I picked for now.

Les Guillotines – L’Aube

Les Spadassins come from Rennes and released their second vinyl-EP in December 2011. It looks very retro at least (covers like this make me greedy!). Some bandmembers used to play in Les Dadds which I say perform live some years ago. Two songs in English, and two in French on this EP. It reminds me of British Beat, combined with French Yé-yé and a little bit of soul. Of course we choose for one of the two French songs, the soulful “L’Effet que ça fait”. Enjoy the soulful organ!

Les Spadassins – L’Effet que ça fait

Under the Radar (8): Liz Cherhal

Well not quite actually because Sylvester put her on his Yearlist, but Liz Cherhal’s album remained under the radar this year. But I guess, being Jeanne Cherhal’s sister she is used to it.. (go here for a rare video of the two siters together).

In 2010 she worked together with boyfriend Alexis HK on a children’s project : “Ronchonchon et Compagnie”, and in 2011 there finally was a new album of her own: “Il est arrivé quelque chose“.
Some of the songs on this album we already knew for her earlier EP, but that was from 2008 already, so it was high time to come with something new. And as we hoped for, on “Il est arrivé quelque chose” she brings us the things she excels in: accordion, humour and well written songs.
In one of Sylvester’s favourites, you can hear all that:

Liz Cherhal – Quand Je Regarde La Mer

Under the Radar (7): Albrecht Mayer

  • Posted on 15/01/2012
  • /Under Musique

In Woody Allen’s latest movie Midnight in Paris, Marion Cotillard’s supersexy character claims that she wants to live in the Belle Époque, France’s Impressionist L’Age d’Or before World War I. On his recent album Bonjour Paris, German oboist Albrecht Mayer revisits those tranquil boulevards of Claude Debussy – who thought that the term Impressionism was invented by imbecile critics –, Jean Français, Vincent d’Indy, or Reynaldo Hahn (see pic), lover of Marcel Proust and probably the hero of his unfinished novel Jean Santeuil. À Chloris, mélodie sur un poème de Théophile de Viau, originally composed for voice and piano, is arranged for solo oboe on Mayer’s album, now sounding like a Baroque remembrance – a fine lyrical finale for Mayer’s album, the piece was actually written in 1913, when the Beautiful Era already had been swept away by history.

Albrecht Mayer – À Chloris

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