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Brazilian Waxing, French Style

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

Admittedly, 2011 not only had trouvailles up its sleeve, but some serious bummers. Though I’m not talking Götz the Molester or any other of the obvious candidates here, but the real disappointments, letdowns, failures and fiascos. So here’s a Woeful Orgy of Rubbishy STuff, in short: the Worst List with the year’s albums to get over with.

01. Lulu Gainsbourg, Jazz EP. Many sons have problems with their famous fathers, and Lulu takes revenge, grand-style. Especially merciless: his Brazilian Waxing of La Javanaise. Charlotte, Bambou, and Jane decided not to take part in his first full-length album. I have an idea why.

02. Keren Ann, 101. Or how the Empress of Melancholia transformed into some wilted vegetable. The feel of the album might be Heroin Chic, as a friend of mine put it, but its bigger problem is its paralysis. You’ll easily find more vision, motion and emotion in an IKEA rack.

03. Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stage Whispers. A mix of unassuming synth and trance ditties from the IRM sessions and a bunch of live material downers, this is one unbalanced, monotonous, boring mess. Turkey on top: a most direful cover of Dylan’s Just Like a Woman.

04. Camille, Ilo Veyou. If you thought Camille’s previous vocal acrobatics were show-offy, you haven’t listened to Ilo Veyou yet. And you should, in case you like a chanteuse permanently yelling „I am an artist!“ in your ears. If not, you might regard this one as an atrocity.

05. Ödland, Sankta Lucia. The times they are a-changin’: Two years ago, Ödland’s surrealist antique pop concept was fresh, different and dreamlike. Now it suffers from the deadly more-of-the-same illness, the priggish Slumberland attitude and Alizée B’s arthouse lolita character. This one sucks.

Extra:

06. Coeur de Pirate, Blonde. The full-body tattooed Golden Baby of the year with a competently produced, but quite unengaging album full of sugarcandy darling ballads – music to burn off your thumb to with your Bic lighter. Caution: Many people did so at Al Bano & Romina Power concerts.

Superbien 2011 Yearlist

  • Posted on 31/12/2011
  • /Under Musique

No, this ain’t the yearlist to end all yearlists. Actually, it was quite an interesting year, full of sleepers, slumbersome French kisses and somnolent earworms. In short, a year to wake up. It was called 2011. So, eleven for a year to remember. There you are:

11. Daphné, Moi plus vouloir dormir seule. I can’t recall any other tune from her Bleu Venise album, but you won’t get more eternity for your money.

10. DJ Le Clown, Making Plans for Houston. Not from 2011, I think, but a premier mashup hooker of a song. Sadly, the YT video meanwhile was banned due to sexual content. Serge vs. Whitney vs. XTC. Jan Willem commented: „Houston, we have a problem.“

09. Marie-Pierre Arthur, Pourquoi. The Quebec No. 1 indie smash hit that never was. Poptastic one, and Marie-Pierre’s not even my type. See also Buck 65 below.

Video here.

08. Vaea Sylvain/ François de Roubaix, Mareva. A song from the Mid-60s I’ve listened to a thousand times this year, and not available on the net. I met Vaea Sylvain in November in Paris, and it’s a long story. Maybe I’ll tell you some day. Maybe.

07. Nous Non Plus, Bunga Bunga. Album: Freudian Slip. The best intertextual popster band since Dutch Gruppo Sportivo in the 80s, this time with an irresistible hommage to Silvio, Imperator of the Italian Orgy.

Video here.

06. Slove, Carte Postale. Electro isn’t dead. The singer’s name is Sarah Krebs, and for 3:20 min, you can have sex, not with her, of course, but with this tune. It feels exactly like she says: „Superbien.“

05. Benjamin Biolay, Le Bonheur, Mon Cul. The album was, erm, shitty, but this is Biolay’s metamorphosis into God, and that God is fat, sweaty, sleazy, and burns up 1000 rubbers per night. Best chanson title of the year. God’s name is Barry White, for sure.

04. L, Initiale. Mademoiselle Mélo on the boulevard of broken lolitas and bohemiens, and undoubtedly the most consistent French album of the year.

03. Buck 65, Tears of My Heart. Le Nouveau Western meets Piaf and Gréco in Buck 65’s supreme collaboration with lovely Olivia Ruiz. Yo, big one. Album also features Marie-Pierre Arthur, see entry no. 9.

02. Siobhan Wilson, La Javanaise. Her 2010 debut already featured Brel’s Voir un ami pleurer, and except for Serge’s emissions avant-prèmieres version, there has been no better version of La Javanaise in fifty years.

01. La Femme, Sur la Planche. It didn’t get more hypnotic, more sexy, more sonic or more convincing in 2011, and the Biarritz-based band – a cross between the B-52’s and a knife sharpener – isn’t even signed yet. They call that sound Tropical Wave, but its other name is Retro Heaven. And that (see left) was the cover.

Supersexy Motherfuckin’

  • Posted on 25/12/2011
  • /Under Musique

An R&B vocal band with a highly complicated history, The Moments (also known as Ray, Goodman & Brown) formed in Hackensack, New Jersey in the mid-60s, signed shortly after to Sylvia Robinson’s Stang label and had their breakthrough smash hit with Love on a Two-Way Street which hit #1 in 1970. In the mid-70s, they established themselves as masters of first class satin sheets soul, with Look at Me (I’m in Love) – being sexy motherfuckers long before the time when The Artist formerly known as Prince used the term for them Eighties chicks. In 1973, they joined forces with the lesser known Baltimore R&B entrepreneurs The Whatnauts for the all-time classic Girls. The song was only a minor hit in the U.S., but a huge success all over Europe then – that’s why they also did a Gallic version, French smoothie style.

Moments – Look at Me

Moments – Look at Me (Version française)

Moments & Whatnauts – Girls

Moments & Whatnauts – Girls (Version française)

FS Vintage: Léo Marjane

  • Posted on 23/12/2011
  • /Under Musique

Obviously she’s still alive, 99 years old – she’s even got a Facebook page. In the late 30s and during the first half of the 40s, Léo Marjane was one of the biggest songbirds in France, with her sultry and somewhat forlorn voice that enriched great songs like Seule ce soir, a tune credited to Charles Trenet everywhere but actually written by Paul Jules Durand; don’t trust the internet. The role model of La Piaf, Marjane fell from grace abruptly after the Liberation of France in August 1944, having performed a little bit too enthusiastically at cabarets and dancing halls frequented by Wehrmacht soldiers and the SS. The applause of the wrong guys catapulted her into the abyss of oblivion, but as we all know, every abyss has an echo: Rarely it sounds as sweet as in Seule ce soir, and surely in Léo’s Gallic version of the all-time classic September in the Rain.

Léo Marjane – Seule ce soir
Léo Marjane – En Septembre dans la pluie

La Japonaise

  • Posted on 19/12/2011
  • /Under Video

You can hear a quite classy accordion player above, as well as a grande dame de la chanson, plus … Leslie Feist simultaneously impersonating Jane Birkin and German 80s airhead Nena: a cutting-edge mixture indeed, with Serge’s lyrics heading straight to Fukushima.

Covers Deluxe: Stax, No Motown

  • Posted on 08/12/2011
  • /Under Musique

Few people remember him, but from the early 70s to the mid-80s, Michel Stax was, well, maybe not a household name, but a regular guest at Québécois clubs and venues, including bell-bottoms and that certain haircut my elder sister found so irresistible then. He almost exclusively did cover versions of other huge hits, among them Moustaki’s Milord and the French version of Hurricane Smith’s Oh Babe, What Would You Say, before he turned David Lee Roth’s men’s room take on Just a Gigolo into an outlandishly phony fairground number in 1985; his last hit, and one for the catalogue of camp, revised edition. 12 years earlier, he had covered Al Kooper’s miniature opera I Can’t Quit Her in a quite futuristic adaptation – my elder sister still claims that the karaoke machine wasn’t invented then.

Michel Stax – Car je t’aime

French Teachers Only

  • Posted on 08/12/2011
  • /Under Musique

Intriguing idea, splendid concept: Every year the French embassy in Berlin, the Bureau Export and schoolbook publishers Cornelsen cooperate when issuing another volume of their FrancoMusiques compilations. The artwork of the meanwhile fourth installment in the series may be a bit run-of-the-mill, but the content offers a fine panorama of most recent French pop, featuring tracks by everybody’s darlings like Zaz and Yelle, but also smashing stuff by lesser known artists, e.g. the gorgeous melancholia of L (see mp3 below), the hypnotic electro pop of Slove, or the fulminant flow of Parisian rappers Sexion d’Assaut. Plus, the compilation is for free and can be ordered here, though – sorry, letdown of the week – only by teachers of French living in Germany. You’ll surely find a trick to snatch a copy.

L – Mes lèvres

Hot Hausfrau Entertainment

  • Posted on 07/12/2011
  • /Under Musique

Once the famous Blue Note label was home of Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, or Thelonius Monk. Nowadays, its catalogue features jazz artist impersonators like German so-called entertainer Götz Alsmann. On his new album In Paris, he covers songs by Trenet, Aznavour, Montand, and others, in some rather remarkable style: The band, featuring an extraordinarily obtrusive vibraphonist,  swings like a red hot hausfrau changing a vacuum cleaner bag, while Alsmann himself buoyantly chuckles and chortles, guffaws and giggles his way through the chansons, his personal highlight possibly being his version of Serge’s early tongue-in-cheek ditty Cha Cha Cha du Loup – now sounding like Chester the Molester on the loose at some German primary school.

Götz Alsmann – Der Wolf tanzt Cha-Cha-Cha

The Alsmann Treatment

  • Posted on 06/11/2011
  • /Under Video

On his new album “In Paris”, German entertainer Götz Alsmann gives a lot of classic French tunes a quite special treatment. On his version of Charles Trenet’s La Mer, he sounds every bit as brisk and snappy as Hauptmann Ernst Jünger when he played the piano for the rest of the German Kommandostab at the Parisian Hotel Majestic in 1941. The only difference probably is that Jünger had a more trendy haircut, and a significantly groovier swing.

Aznavour Toujours

  • Posted on 01/11/2011
  • /Under Musique

One of Frank Sinatra’s most famous live recordings starts with the words: „We will now do the national anthem, but you needn’t rise.“ That could as well be the introduction to the new Charles Aznavour album, Toujours. Aznavour’s songs had and still have anthem quality in a national sense, reflecting state, sense and sensibility of his country. Toujours mirrors even more: Un homme de 87 ans whose reflection still shows Charlie, his alter ego in Truffaut’s 1962 Paris noir Tirez sur le pianiste, all the desolation, longing, and heartache, blended with the picture of the French big league entertainer who even balanced most embarrassing moments with … well, style. You won’t get more Gallic sweep, pathos and sentiment for your money this year. As for Tu ne m’aime plus: 10 handkerchiefs.

Charles Aznavour – Tu ne m’aime plus

Bonus: The German version of Aznavour’s early 70s Les plaisirs démodés, beginning as a stroboscope disco funkfest, evolving into sublime adult pop and finally into a spoken word oratorio, rugged individual style.

Charles Aznavour – Tanz Wange an Wange mit mir

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