My Top Francophone Albums

I know how difficult it is to find great music in the French language.

Even in France you’ll find the majority of songs on the radio are sung in English. In 1996 the situation reached a point where the government felt the need to decree that 40% of all music played by radio stations be sung in French. At the time this was met with protestations that the lack of quality francophone music would make such a demand too repressive.

And what’s worse, the most popular classic French singers are, to my ears at least, awful. And the classic French chanson, sung in this staggeringly annoying style is very popular for reasons I suspect I will never understand.

If one day, like I did, you decided to fill your MP3 player with francophone music in order to become more fully immersed in French language, you would be easily forgiven for giving up on the idea very quickly after searching iTunes and Amazon for suitable albums.

There a loads of great francophone bands out there but surprisingly few resources to help you find them, and naturally even fewer if you are restricted to searching sites written in English.

So with the sole aim of doing my little bit to improve the situation here is a list of some of my favourite francophone albums. I have avoided listing multiple albums by the same artist unless there is a good reason (as with La Ruda) as I figure once you’ve got a foot in the door you don’t need me to give you the band’s entire discography.

There is a rough order to the list – it starts with my very favourite albums, but I’m not going to pretend I agonised over the position of every entry!

I love this album. Traditionally a ska/reggae group, this album is a departure from Bablylon Circus’s previous albums and has a very different feel from their previous album Dances of Resistance – where DWR is raw, LBE is smooth, where DWR is earnest, LBE is joyful. They are both great albums but La Belle Étoile is the album which made Babylon Circus my favourite francophone group. And having seen them live three times in the past year I can tell you that they are also one of the best live acts in the world today.

Each time I listen to Les Saisons S’tassent I wonder why I don’t listen to it more often. Wonderful clean guitars and a rich melodic bass. Highly recommended.

This album took a little while to grow on me but as is so often the case, it really got under my skin. A mixture of creeping and energetic rock, clean and distorted guitar, and a great rock vocal, there’s really not a bad track on the record.

There’s a show called Acoustic on TV5 Monde, the only French TV station we get in the UK. More than half the time the artists are quite forgettable, but every now and then someone brilliant pops up. With his backing singers and dancers, The Soul Wash Boys, Ben L’Oncle Soul’s stage presence is impressive but more importantly, the music is superb.

This is rock in the more balls-out sense than Eiffel with rampant, heavy punk guitars and excitable drums throughout. As well as the male vocals there is a beautiful female voice provided by Marie-Ève Roy, often providing harmonies but occasionally singing solo as on the track Dommage Collatéral. Although they don’t have a keyboardist as a band member, the album uses piano parts to great effect.

This is an EP rather than an album. Five great energetic rock’n'ska tracks straight out of the top drawer.

Formally La Ruda Salska, every La Ruda album has a different flavour. You’d struggle to believe that the band that created the pure rock of 24 Images / Second is the same band who recorded the ska-filled Passager du réel. Grand Soir is somewhere between the two – a kind of clean guitar rock and roll with prominent brass section on top of a ska bass.

Voted the best French reggae album at the 2009 Reggae Awards. Checking out iTunes I notice that Funambule is the most played on the album and that’s as good a track as any to call my favourite, but going through the tracks I really can’t find one that lets the side down. All good.

Unavailable in iTunes, Amazon, or any other major MP3 store, you can listen to samples of this album at Xtrib.com. How such a great album has not found itself into the mainstream of digital downloads I simply don’t know.

As far as I know, Canadians Immaculate Machine have only ever recorded six songs in French, and they are all here on this six-song album. Each of these tracks was originally recorded with English lyrics on their 2005 album Ones and Zeros. Alternative/Indie Rock/Pop, I’m not sure what you’d call it, but it’s pretty fresh stuff. Two frontmen, one of them a frontwoman, sharing the singing chores and often harmonising.

As mentioned previously, La Ruda are the only band that I’ve included twice in this list. 24 Images / Second was one of the very first French language albums I bought and the one that lead me to believe that great French music did exist. A great rock album.

The first of two power-pop candy-rock albums in the list. And the first of two artists who graduated from the school of TV talent shows (the other being Ycare). Marie-Mai came from the Canadian Star Académie and has so far produced three studio albums. Nothing overly sophisticated – crank up the guitars over some pop melodies of you go – but it sounds good to me.

The same sort of thing as Marie-Mai but with the voice of someone on forty-a-day. The only complaint I have is the utterly unneccesary overuse of auto-tune on the vocals. Why do that to her voice? This is so common now in modern pop music that I suspect young kids now probably can’t even hear the robotic overtones.

Gained some fame in England after releasing a translated version of Miss Maggie in 1985, a comedic attack on our then Prime Minister. Often political, with shades of England’s Billy Bragg, Renaud has a distinctive voice which is refreshingly unlike those of most classic old-school French singers. I can understand if on first listen you’d want to run a mile from this style of singing, so annoying as it often is. For some reason Renaud breaks the mold and produces really good records, and Rouge Sang is one of the best.

Not quite as silly and not quite as rocky as Les Trois Accords but nonetheless tongue-in-cheek light-relief rock. For me the best song on this album is Mon Pére Etait Tellement De Gauche “My dad was so left wing” which I translated a while ago – an acoustic guitar and cello number with daft lyrics such as “My father was so left-wing we had loads of accidents, he systematically refused to give way to the right.”

If you want to be correct, this is Néo-trad – short for Néo-Traditional – a style of music, we’re told, that arose in Quebec around ten years ago. If you want to describe it in more meaningful terms, it is essentially modern folk/rock/electronica. But there’s no electronica on this album.

The lyrics are awful, the music is simple, the singing is horrific, but for some reason I can’t stop listening to them. Very funny if you’re in the right mood – unlike the French sense of humour that I’ve never really tuned into, juvenile jokers from Quebec do make me laugh.

Ycare gets three country icons for being of Lebanese origin, Senegalese birth and French adoption. I only include the Lebanese link as he is so often referred to as a Lebanese artist. A great album full of thoughtfully arranged acoustic guitar-lead rock songs. Having finished fourth in the French version of Pop Idol Nouvelle star you might not expect anything other than a formulaic release aimed at the mass market. That is not the case at all.

The band list their influences as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine and Soundgarden. Those influences are far more evident on this album than on their 2003 release Le Chemin. And if it helps, the track currently playing in the background, Respire is currently reminding me of Placebo. They’ve also cut back a lot on the electric keyboards on this album. Although Le Chemin was very well produced and sounded great, there was something missing, something forgettable, which I think 300 Lesions puts right.

Folk/Gispy I guess you’d call it. Very fast paced acoustic alternative rock with a line up consisting of sax, violin, double bass, accordion, guitar, piano and drums.

Not every track on this album is a gem, but there are some songs that are so good and fit into a genre that I don’t think any other album on this list can claim. It’s rap with a softer edge, with heavy use of orchestral arrangements and often story-driven lyrics. The opening track Roméo et Juliette blew me away when I heard it for the first time, but it was songs like the more upbeat Gilles écoute un disque de rap et fond en larmes and the piano-filled C’est du lourd (both translated on this site), that make the album one of my favourites.

I heard this R&B/Soul/Pop album for the first time a couple of months ago. I really loved it at first, but I’ve not listened to it as much as I thought I would. There are a few top tracks though such as Pleine Lune and Onze Minutes which make me want to bring this album to your attention.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find much information online about the Tal Descrèves. Just one album, released in 2007 and fewer than 300 friends on MySpace she appears not to have much of a presence at all. I’m not sure if this is the case in her native Belgium, but I can’t help thinking this album deserves to be more widely known. OK, perhaps there are no really outstanding tracks, but it’s gotta be worth bringing to the attention of anyone looking for female-fronted rock ‘n’ roll.

When I first saw BB Brunes performing on tele, I was quite astonished to find that the lead singer was a man. He doesn’t sound like one. This is energetic, straightforward three-piece indie rock with influences we can assume from bands such as Arctic Monkeys and The Libertines.

Superbly produced, clean guitar with prominent bass tracks. Pep’s is short for Florian Peppuy and this was his fourth album release.

A couple of dodgy tracks stop this album from being higher up the list, so in order for it to make the list at all there have to be a couple of belters. There are and they come within the opening three songs. Ça sent l’été and Ça me vexe are fantastic songs – if the rest of the album had been as good as that it would be a near perfect rock record.

This is a tricky one – sometimes iTunes randomly plays me of Bénabar’s songs and I get pulled right into the lyrics, often cracking a laugh. He is a very talented lyricist who steers clear of being annoyingly profound, prefering to work on more light-hearted subjects. His upbeat, lively numbers are great and humourous, his slower, more rambling songs can sometimes be difficult to take. I include him here because as a lyricist he’s probably the best in the list.