Posted by Sky

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

Requiem pour un Twisteur 1

  • Posted on 02/03/2011
  • /Under Video

Exactly 20 years ago, Serge Gainsbourg bought the farm, as the Americans like to say. In 1962, he had written Requiem pour un twisteur, la danse du Twist being “the greatest ritual since circumcision” (Leonard Cohen) in those early Sixties. The song was, in Serge’s own words, “about a guy who twists himself to death”, but certainly it was also a song about life. A Gainsbourg one. Only the dance fashions had changed a bit through the years.

Requiem pour un Twisteur 2

  • Posted on 02/03/2011
  • /Under Video

Another recapturing of the un-twistable by Aurèle Salmon and Ludovic Hellet, also known as Vocalcordes. Like clockwork.

Requiem pour un Twisteur 3

  • Posted on 02/03/2011
  • /Under Video

Nice, if maybe a little too fast bar-jazz-trio version of the maybe coolest composition of the Gainsbourg repertoire by Sao-Paulo-based Les Serges. Wow bassman!

Dead Beats and a Sad Tomato

  • Posted on 27/02/2011
  • /Under Musique

On the cover of her brand new album 101, Keren Ann tries to sell us a tough babe royale with cheese, Honey Bunny style, but actually, the box contains just dead beats and a sad tomato. Nine years ago, the forlorn princess of her nouvelle chanson debut La Disparition told an exceptionally seductive story of longing and melancholia – high in the ranks of FS’s best-of-the-decade albums, and rightly so –, and maybe it was nowhere to go but down from there. While 07’s Lay Your Head Down already was a huge disappointment, 101, also English lyrics only, finally comes as a lesson in artistic rigour and negative energy, oscillating indecisively between neo folk and a pale silhouette of 90s dream pop: half of the tracks – sounding like a portable pulled out of a swamp – are oppressively boring Hope Sandoval copies, the uptempo songs indie pop bubblegum of the shallowest kind, while the title tune offers a bromidic 5:30 min loop that only serves to induce chronic fatigue syndrome, but fast. The limp vegetable is Keren Ann herself. Confusing intimacy with ennui, the royalty of yore has a new title: tristesse drama queen of the year.

Keren Ann – She Won’t Trade It for Nothing

Titties & Ski

  • Posted on 13/02/2011
  • /Under Musique

The first half of the 70s saw a virtual shitload of soft sex comedies. While the wave of the enormously successful German Schulmädchen Reports gushed over Europe, French-Canadian filmmakers also tried to cash in on the phenomenon. 1971’s Après-Ski (a.k.a. Snowballin’ – The Exciting New Indoor-Outdoor Sport!) was among those movies, and while the funk-scored hardcore of Deep Throat was still a year away, Ski director Roger Carling jazzed up his story with some legendary grooves as well. For more than three decades, the rare Ski soundtrack was regarded as the Québécois Holy Grail of Funk; for the complete story of the record, see here. Now re-released by Les Disques Pluton, it maybe doesn’t fully live up to its myth, but comes with some remarkably fat, fusion-like moments by Canadian band Illustration, plus a solemn chanson by actress Mariette Lévesque (see right) – une adorable femme de neige.

Illustration – Le Grand Marc

Mariette Lévesque – Dors avec moi

Emilie Voisin chante Barthes et Kreisler

  • Posted on 12/02/2011
  • /Under Musique

Rottweil, a small town near the Swabian Highlands, belongs to the roughest parts of Germany; there’s certainly a reason why they named a fierce butcher’s dog after the borough. You’d never suspect someone like Emilie Voisin (see right) here, and maybe that’s why FS overlooked her debut album A part ça tout va bien last year; a swell one, featuring a nearly irresistible song about French philosopher Roland Barthes, as well as an alluring rendering of Liebesleid, a mood-piece written in 1910 by Viennese violin virtuoso Fritz Kreisler, scholar of Bruckner and Massenet, friend of Edward Elgar and one of the very first intertextual artists, passing off his very own melody as an original composition by Baroque composer Giuseppe Tartini until 1935. In 2004, German chanteuse Lisa Bassenge payed another tribute to Kreisler’s immortal charlatanry: a sparse one, amalgamating echoes of new wave romance with some awkwardly hypnotizing Carribean swing you’ll only find on the coast of Berlin.

Emilie Voisin – Roland Barthes

Emilie Voisin – Liebesleid

Nylon w/ Lisa Bassenge – Liebesleid

The Mouth of Serge

  • Posted on 21/01/2011
  • /Under Video

Pietro Marcello’s movie La Bocca del Lupo, shown at the 2010 Berlin Film Festival, features the urban underbelly of Genua, rugged Italian individuals, the amore between a long-time con and a transsexual, and Serge’s L’eau à la bouche. Merci à Matthias.

L’Amour Est Bleu

  • Posted on 01/01/2011
  • /Under Musique

In 1967, Vicky Leandros hit #4 at the Eurovision Song Contest with the bittersweet kitsch ballad L’amour est bleu, written by space age pop pioneer André Popp. While Vicky scored a modest hit, as well as Claudine Longet a few months later, it was French orchestra leader Paul Mauriat – kind of the Gallic pendant to American muzak lightster Ray Conniff – who made ten tons of bucks with the song, topping the US charts with his key party warm-up version for five consecutive weeks in spring 1968. The same year, covers by Hungarian jazz guitarist Gabor Szabo, reggae entrepreneur Jackie Mittoo, and awfully neglected actress/ singer Vivian Dandridge came out. Plus the stratocaster aberration by Jeff Beck – no. 14 in Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time. Say what?

Paul Mauriat – L’amour est bleu

Jackie Mittoo – Love is Blue

Gabor Szabo – Love is Blue

Vivian Dandridge – Love is Blue

Jeff Beck – Love is Blue

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