Bourgeois vs Bashung

  • Posted on 04/04/2011
  • /Under Musique

French filles singing songs about girls, to empower women. That’s what Paroles de Femmes is all about, the album featuring Claire Keim, Natasha St Pier, Shy’m and Amel Bent was released on March 8. International Women’s Day, of course. The songs are covers by Brel, Obispo, Becaud and Christophe. Hate to say this, especially with championed girls like Claire Keim and Nolwenn Leroy on board, but most covers are a bit dull. One that stands out in a good way is Amandine Bourgeois’ version of Bashungs slide-fest Osez Jospehine. Amandine (pictured) chose to  leave the slide-guitar out, very brave. To compare, a live version by the grand master himself (RIP), who adds a little Dylan.

Amandine Bourgeois – Osez Josephine
Bashung – Osez Josephine (live)

Otarie

  • Posted on 04/04/2011
  • /Under Musique

Guestpost! Natasha on Canadian duo Otarie: ‘They are like leather pants: sensual, supple, smelly and sexy.’

Although they’ve played big festivals like Francofolies and keep gigging in all kinds of local places in their native Montréal, Québec duo Otarie (a reference to a baby seal, or ‘bébé phoque’ in French) has been around since 2006. They are still considered part of the alternative scene not for their simplistic sound, but because of their lyrics, which are explicitly fun with a hint of gay bitchiness, especially when they slam local has-beens, all in quality Québécois slang.

Canine Sutto, the guy (Janine Sutto was an actress, think gay stage name) and Gaétane Montana, the lovely red head, say they’re just friends and share the same taste in dirty lyrics. They mix all kinds of styles (and different positions) and use words you’ll have to Google like ‘plotte’ (‘muff’), ‘poche’ (‘scrotum’), ‘graine’ (‘dick’) and ‘foune’ (‘ass’).

The puns fly very low in songs like ‘Kuni Kuni’ and ‘Au Camp Trois Pinis’, titles that don’t need translation and ‘Spourrer’, a loving song about ‘spooning and screwing’. Students love Otarie’s in your face-ness and just like jerking off, other people either like it too or just lie about it.

If you like it fast:  Otarie – Horny
If you like it slow: Otarie – Dans mon lit

Lanu

  • Posted on 02/04/2011
  • /Under Musique

Roxy Music’s 1982 hit single More Than This easily qualifies as one of the most oily ballads of the New Wave, and the greasy karaoke performance by Bill Murray in Lost in Translation just served to prove the old Marx statement that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. On his brand new album Her 12 Faces – a perfectly laid-back, positively eclectic and estival record with awesome guest singer Megan Washington on several tracks –, Australian pop entrepreneur Lance Ferguson alias Lanu does the trick: He transforms Roxy’s bathos into French-language electro tune raffinement – a jolie Gallic dot on an otherwise all-English, highly innovative early summer album.

Lanu – More Than This

Gorgeous hommage to Lanu’s grandfather, famous Hawaiian steel guitarist Bill Wolfgramm who recorded New Zealand’s first ever LP record back in 1956:

Lanu – The Coral Route

Lisa Portelli video

  • Posted on 31/03/2011
  • /Under Video

Her second album drops in May. This is a scary, yet compelling video.

Philemon Chante

  • Posted on 30/03/2011
  • /Under Musique

Canadian singer goes to Cuba and records an album in the same studio as Buena Vista Social Club-members recorded: talk about putting the son into chanson. As I understand it from this biography, Philémon Bergeron-Langlois (aka Philemon Chante) did contact a few people before he went to the island, but wasn’t fully prepared.  It took him about a week to find the right musicians. He was lucky to get recording time at the famous Egrem Studios, where Beny Moré, Ruben Gonzales and a whole bunch of legendary Cuban musicians worked. Yami, who sings harmonies, did not speak French. Not a problem, as Gainsbourg once proved when he had the I-Threes sing phonetically on his two reggae-albums.  And so does Yami on Philemon Chante’s Session Cubaines.
It’s a beautiful album, very sparsely arranged, with touches of piano, hints of trumpet and mostly gentle strumming. Philemon’s voice is like Vincent Delerm’s, you either like his ‘on the verge of tears-style’, or you don’t. I think it adds to the melancholy of the music, the calm atmosphere in the songs. Let the sun shine.

Philemon Chante – Je te mange

Caroline d’Été

  • Posted on 30/03/2011
  • /Under Musique

Representing Granby (Quebec), Caroline d’Été won several chanson-contests before recording her debut-album (there was this EP also). Her lyrics are very poetic, her singing style is reminiscent of slammeurs like Luciole, though I wouldn’t call Caroline a slammeuse. To me, her music is very bass-driven, her voice floats on upright basslines, with added piano, drums and fx. There’s a triphop influence, I’m sure. I can understand why she supported Coeur de Pirate – though CdE sounds a tad more mature then CdP,  yet her voice has a smaller range. I wonder if CdE’s song Ton Morceau is about the time she worked in a Montreal record store.

Caroline d’Été – Faire avec

Where Martine Blooms and Bobbys Sing

  • Posted on 29/03/2011
  • /Under Musique

In spring 1968, countrypop schmaltzduke Bobby Goldsboro stormed the charts worldwide with the biggest hit of his career: Honey, a brilliant death disc weeper that was even more devastating than his haircut. The song, written by Acuff-Rose songsmith Bobby Russell, had already been recorded two months earlier by former Kingston Trio member Bob Shane – a version that obviously was a bit too down-to-earth for so much camp heaven. The same year, Texan ex-rockabilly semi princess Margaret Lewis even did an answer song, told from the perspective of the deceased spouse – #33 in the Cash Box country charts then –, and Quebecoise singer Martine Deno cashed in with a French language version about her long gone daddy … a remarkably sexy epitaph, and surely a record to die for.

Bob Shane – Honey

Bobby Goldsboro – Honey

Margaret Lewis – Honey (I Miss You Too)

Martine Deno – Mon Papa

Extra: The German version of Honey, provided by FS éminence grise Roy Black. Never before available on the net. Quelle horreur.

Gerhard Wendland – Honey

Jill Barber

  • Posted on 29/03/2011
  • /Under Musique

Canadian beauty Jill Barber sounds like a cross between Blossom Dearie and Shivaree’s Ambrosia Parsley. On her former albums she sang smokey jazz-tunes in English, but now she’s dabbling in French too. Which is nice. This is the video for her first French single Tous mes rêves (out last year), on her upcoming album there’s another, sultrier tune that I’m posting here. I’m usually not a fan of Franglish, when it’s French girls trying to sing in English. But the other way around is very arousing.

Jill Barber – Dis-moi

The Raw and the Smooth

  • Posted on 28/03/2011
  • /Under Musique

Buck 65’s Talkin’ Honky Blues was nothing less than a revelation in 2003: There was rap again, whitebread hip-hop even, thrown in a centrifuge together with folk flavour, reverbs of Cash-ified country and Salinger echoes of adolescent blues, refined with a hoarse, rusty voice that certainly didn’t come straight outta Compton, but out of Mt. Uniacke, some distant hicktown in Nova Scotia, Can. Rich Terfry/ Buck 65 was already a vet way back then, now celebrating 20 Odd Years with his aptly titled new record. Actually, it feels like a perfected roundup of his earlier efforts, a panopticon of sounds oscillating with a sleepwalker’s certainty between the raw and the smooth, the sharp strangehold of Zombie Delight, the sparse, solemn intensity of She Said Yes, or Stop, a duet pop gem with Canadian singer Hannah Georgas sounding like having been written by the new President of the Blondie fan club. Unquestionably a superior contender for album of 2011, 20 Odd Years also features two French language tunes – Final Approach, an amiable collaboration with Quebecoise chanteuse Marie-Pierre Arthur, and Tears of Your Heart, a gorgeous alliance with Parisian associate Olivia Ruiz: This is the nouveau western.

Buck 65 w/ Marie-Pierre Arthur – Final Approach

Buck 65 w/ Olivia Ruiz – Tears of Your Heart

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