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January 1, 2010 at 2:45 pm |
Babylon Circus, Bristol UK, Halloween 2009.
A little clue as to which band produced the best album of 2009.
To start the new year here is my list of the ten best French language albums of 2009.
Broadly speaking we have one hip hop, two rock, three ska, one reggae and three humorous, which are predominantly rock-based.
There were several albums that I was expecting to put on this list but discovered were in fact late 2008 releases. It all goes by far too quickly for me.
In the next post I’ll highlight some of the releases that we can look forward to over the next year. While 2009 has been a great year for ska, there is promise from bands such as Vulgaires Machins that we’ll have some top quality rock to get our ears around in 2010.
I couldn’t leave a Trois Accords-shaped hole in this list.
Like all their albums, this release contains some of the worst singing you are ever likely to hear outside of the X Factor but sometimes the inanity of a record such as Dans Mon Corps is exactly what the moment calls for.
Dan Mon Corps came out in October and sees the band from Quebec in just as ridiculous and joyful form as ever. The track Croquer des cous is one of my favourites but gives the game away that these guys, despite their attempts to pretend otherwise, are in fact pretty talented punk/rock songwriters and musicians.
I would have liked to have included Diam’s S.O.S. here but her incessant talking, worse, her incessant whispering between tracks drives me bonkers.
I also considered Diam’s close friend Sinik’s album Ballon D’or in its place. I had wanted to translate the song 4-4-2 from Ballon D’or shortly after the world cup draw a few days after the release of the album at the end of November.
L’ecrasement De Tête is more intersting and enjoyable than either Diam’s or Sinik’s latest releases which I why I have chosen it here.
These guys were the subject of
a post in October where I was in the happy position of being able to quote an Only Fools And Horses sketch. Their album art was plastered over Paris metro stations advertising their current tour when I was over there at Christmas.
Their music is also fairly humorous and lighthearted but less shameless than either that of Les Singes Savants or their Canadian counterparts, Les Trois Accords, despite having represented France in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2007.
I didn’t care very much for BB Brunes’ first album,
Blonde Comme Moi. While it had its moments, I found it largely rather empty. I had however been looking forward to their second album,
Nico Teen Love ever since hearing the preview tracks on their website. It is altogether a more interesting and accomplished offering.
There are clearly strong influences from bands such as The Libertines and Arctic Monkeys (Black and Blue is almost obscenely Monkeyesque) and when you start listening to the key riff in Bouche B you will be forgiven for thinking you are listening to Queens of the Stone Age. At one point there is even a blatant, though probably unintentional, Pulp riff.
Although there are 15 tracks, over half of them are under three minutes and none of them are over four minutes. I listened to this album for the first time on my iPod while on the treadmill and it did a fine job of keeping me running. It’s rare that I outrun an album and have to “rewind”, but that’s what happened.
Being an ex
Star Académie contestant, my very bones tell me that I should avoid Marie Mai’s music. However, I like pretty much everything this Québécoise has ever recorded including this, her third album, released in September. She is an excellent singer and packs her albums full of pacey, energetic pop rock with the kind of distorted guitar backing that air guitarists fantasize about in front of their bedroom mirrors.
I don’t know why but as the years roll merrily forward, I have started to get into Reggae in a way that I had never felt the need to do previously. I’ve always been a ska fan but only recently has this crossed over to the full blown reggae beats of an album such as Broussaï’s
Perspectives. As well as some great songs, the production quality of this album is fantastic. Every instrument and vocal sounds crisp and clear on top of the dominant bass.
This album was the subject of my last post which was a long, long time ago on December 6th. With no release from one of my favourites, the Québécois Vulgaire Machins, in 2009 (they have finished recording and are currently mixing their new album), Eiffel released one of the few solid French language rock albums of 2009.
Now we’re at the business end of the top ten, here is a EP that I adore. Five fantastic thumping ska tracks, each one a belter. One of the best EPs ever released.
For most of 2009 I didn’t expect to find an album that would prevent
Grand Soir from being my favourite album of 2009. La Ruda have consistently produced great albums ranging in style from the hard rock of
24 images/seconde to the pure ska of
Passager Du Réel.
Grand Soir in my mind is their best release yet.
Not only did Babylon Circus produce the best album of the year, they were also in my mind the
best live band of the year. So good in fact that after seeing them live for the first time in London in October I went to see them again a week later before they left England.
La Belle Étoile was their first release for five years and was a quite a different offering from the previous albums. This album would make my top ten albums of the decade. In any language.
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December 3, 2009 at 7:39 am |
I’ve just performed my regular check for
La Belle Étoile across the UK online music stores and it has recently become available on both iTunes and Amazon.
Unfortunately there is currently a problem with the Amazon widget creator which means that I have only been able to include seven tracks from the album on the widget to the left. Luckily they are seven of the best. You can hear samples from all tracks here
.
Unless something spectacular happens over the next four weeks, I can confidently state that La Belle Étoile is the finest French language album of 2009. I absolutely adore it.
I was privileged to be able to catch two performances by Babylon Circus while they were on the UK leg of their current European tour and given half a chance I fully intend to travel over to France and see them again in the new year.
They are one of the best live bands I’ve ever seen and I for one hope they gain the massive recognition they deserve.
La Belle Étoile, released in March 2009, is something of a musical departure for the band whose last album was release five years ago. Previous studio releases have been packed with hard ska and reggae beats and more than a dash of the revendicatif. This album is slightly more melodic and slightly more subtle and devastating with its attack on your whatever part of your brain is responsible for trapping catchy songs in the internal humbox.
Every base is covered from the thumping, concert-opening Perdu, the thumping, crowd-pleasing La Cigarette, to the understated Des Fois and Le Fils Caché Du Pape to the gorgeous voice of Karina Zeviani on Marions-nous au soleil and the embarrassingly-catchy Nina.
What can I say? I love it. I urge you to use the Amazon widget to the left to listen to extracts.
Tomorrow I will publish a translation of one of the tracks – haven’t decided which yet.
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November 17, 2009 at 4:41 pm |
The album in the widget to the left is not the album discussed in this post. All will become clear.
Yesterday, BB Brunes released their second album Nico Teen Love. Their first single from this album was released several months ago and was available to listen to free online. You can see videos of Dynamite (translated here) and others in the video section of their site. Extracts from three other songs from Nico Teen Love have been available for some time here.
It had been possible to pre-order the album in physical form and, unfortunately, for a physical price but, not wanting another CD in my life I decided to wait until the release date and download from either iTunes or Amazon depending on which was the cheapest (not that I’ve ever found an album that was cheaper on iTunes).
I knew this was at best a foolish gamble and, as I had feared, the album is not available in either store, nor is it available to purchase from the band’s official site. So I now have a physical copy of the album making its way to me from France.
If you want to hear extracts from all the songs on the album you can hear them on the French Amazon store although you will not be able to buy the album outside of France. Alternatively, you can fire up iTunes, navigate to the store and then in the bottom right of your iTunes application select the round flag icon and then use the following list of countries to move to the French store. You can then search for the album and listen to the extracts, but again, unless you have a French iTunes account you won’t be able to get your ears on the full album. The iTunes price of 14.99 euros is horrific and is made worse when you see that it is priced at a much more sensible 9.99 EUR on Amazon.
Amazon have however got their hands on some of my money today after I bought Diam’s new release S.O.S. Voilà pourqoui the album in the widget is not the subject of this post. Unusually this was the same price (GBP 7.99) as in iTunes but I prefer to buy from Amazon so that I get the DRM-free MP3s and Amazon’s downloader integrates the album into your iTunes library for you without any hassle.
So, there will be two reviews coming shortly.
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November 10, 2009 at 2:21 pm |
Babylon Circus, Bristol UK, Halloween 2009
I took the picture to the left at a Babylon Circus gig this Halloween just gone.
I’d seen them in London a few days previously and absolutely had to see them again before they left the UK to continue their tour in France where they were, incidentally, supported by another great French band, Les Gars Dans L’Coin.
It’s been nearly twenty years since I saw a performance so strong that I simply had to see it again as soon as I could.
Back then I was watching two or three gigs a week and back then I myself was touring the pubs and clubs of Southampton (UK) in a four piece cover band.
Having played guitar since I was old enough to say “can I play on your guitar dad?”, I found myself in the backseat position of drummer. There are two reasons for this. Firstly because I was offered the role by a band that already had their claws in the circuit and secondly, because if I had been allowed anywhere near the front of the stage I would have bored the audience to tears. Noone could ever have accused me back in the day of being a “people person.”
That’s not to say of course that the guy or girl behind the drumkit can’t be an entertainer – far from it, indeed in a live performance a talented drummer can take on the task of conducting the audience as well as the band. But that drummer wasn’t me.
Chris (me), Jason, Keith and Andy before a gig circa 1990
You can probably tell this from this photograph from when I was sixteen. I’m the miserable one on the left. That is the look of a guy who never got over not being the guitarist. Notice how even the lights around me are unimpressed.
So with this in mind I’ve been compiling the top ten things that make for a great live performance and I’ll be sharing them with you over the next couple of articles.
However before I do this, what I
really want is some comments from you guys, so don’t be shy –
leave a comment and let me know about some of the best bands you’ve ever seen and why they left such an impression.
When we were young we went dancing to a band at the Rink
They were so far out of tune and time and they didn’t even blink
They were the best in the world as far as we were concerned
I heard them two years on, it was amazing what they’d learned
Twice as cool, twice as fast, twice as loud, twice as long
They were at least twice as good and about half as much fun
Fool’s Gold – The Rainmakers, 2006
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November 5, 2009 at 3:52 pm |
Ever since I first started using the Amazon MP3 widgets on this blog, there has been one in the sidebar over on the right of the page containing a selection of French language songs. These were selected to try to give a taster of some of my favourite groups across a variety of genres.
It stayed the same for a very long time as there was a bug in the Amazon system that meant that I had to start from scratch each time I wanted to change one of the songs. Happily, that bug was recently fixed and I was able to update the widget. Unfortunately not all my favourite groups are available but thankfully a great many are.
It is often the case when I find great new groups they are not available in the Amazon or iTunes UK stores, sometimes not even having made it as far as the French iTunes and Amazon stores, which means I can’t widgetise them here. Le Vilain Volatile is a good example.
So, to mark the long overdue update of the little fella over on the right I thought I would put up a poll for you to rate each track out of ten to see if we can find The Best Song in the Widget.
Unfortunately only UK users will see all fifteen songs in the Widget. French users will only see fourteen and everyone else will see just ten. This is due to the availability of the songs in the various international Amazon stores.
