CD: La Féline - Triomphe

A too-methodical approach weakens the impact of classy French pop album

As a prime example of high-end Gallic art-pop, Triomphe pushes the right buttons. The mid-tempo opening cut “Senga” sets the tone. A motorik rhythm and a shuffling counterpoint are complemented by bubbling bass guitar, insistent single note guitar lines and subtle keyboard stabs. The French-language vocal line is hooky, minor key and delivered in close-miked yet distant voice. It exudes class. Krautrock and Air are in there. A smidge of Stereolab too. As is – with the way the song builds and builds – a suggestion of stadium-rock dynamics.

It’s the same throughout Triomphe, where a sense of reflectiveness and resignation in the melody lines is teamed with finely tuned instrumental arrangements. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the descending structure, Mogadon-paced drums and brooding atmosphere of “Trophée” evoke Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson. The opening bars of “Sépares” nod to Lee Hazlewood. Triomphe is a knowing album.

While also thoroughly agreeable, Triomphe – issued in the UK exactly a year after its French release – is overly deliberate and would have benefitted from some surprises. When Algerian-sounding wind instruments arrive on sixth track “La femme du kioske sur l’eau” it’s as if they were plucked from a style sheet rather than providing evidence of spontaneity.

La Féline used to be a trio but now, for the third album under the name, it is the vehicle of Agnès Gayraud alone. A doctor of philosophy and music journalist, she writes for the French newspaper Libération, has a lengthy academic bibliography and has lectured at California's Stanford University.

In 2016 she published an academic paper titled Are There Any Skills Required to Listen to Pop Music? A crux issue for the article was getting to grips with the concept of “structural listening”. Whether or not the album is listened to “structurally” and despite the distracting meticulousness, Triomphe and its terrific highlight “Sépares” mark Gayraud as a pop auteur worth watching.

Overleaf: Watch the video for “Sépares” from La Féline’s Triomphe

CD: Gaspard Royant - Wishing You a Merry Christmas

Classy, knowing French entry in the easily maligned field of seasonal albums

French stylist Gaspard Royant has recorded at London’s garage-rock-central studio Toe Rag and been produced by Edwyn Collins. Both fit a worldview which encompasses collaborating with Eli Paperboy Reed, who crops up here on “Christmas Time Again”, a cover of Reuben Anderson’s wonderful, soulful 1966 ska single. Drawing a line between garage rock, Sixties urban R&B and soul with dashes of blues and nods to Lee Hazlewood, Royant is a Gallic cousin to Richard Hawley. Unsurprisingly, his first Christmas album is a knowing affair.

Scooping up tracks from Royant’s seasonal singles and marrying them to newly recorded cuts, Wishing You a Merry Christmas is cool, hip and opens with a swinging cover of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” drawn from Phil Spector’s 1963 A Christmas Gift for You from Philles Records album. After this, the self-composed (“C'mon Baby) It's Christmas Time!” sets the tone for a ten-tracker which swims in less-obvious waters, even when a song is over familiar.

Royant’s take on John Lennon’s “Happy Christmas (War is Over)” sticks to the template vocally but otherwise injects a gentle dose of Sigur Rós' textural blur. Eels’ “Everything’s Gonna Be Cool This Christmas” is rendered straightforwardly, but Wham’s “Last Christmas” is given a Roy Orbison-esque makeover. The album ends with a fine, moody, Chris Isaak-indebted run through U2’s “New Year’s Day”.

Tastefulness is a rare commodity with Christmas albums, but Wishing You a Merry Christmas has it in spades. As a similarly classy but new contribution to an easily maligned genre, file it alongside Paul Revere & the Raiders’ bizarre A Christmas Present...and Past, Psychic TV’s Pagan Day, Etiquette Records’ Merry Christmas album, Les Disques Du Crépuscule’s Chantons Noël - Ghosts of Christmas Past and the Ze label’s A Christmas Record.

Overleaf: watch the video for “(C'mon Baby) It's Christmas Time!” from Gaspard Royant’s Wishing You a Merry Christmas

Reissue CDs Weekly: Serge Gainsbourg & Jean-Claude Vannier

The lost soundtrack music to ‘Les Chemins de Katmandou’ hits the shops with a bang

In terms of cinema history, 1969’s Les Chemins de Katmandou is a footnote. Directed by André Cayatte, whose most interesting films were 1963’s interrelated marital dramas Jean-Marc ou la Vie Conjugale and Françoise ou la Vie Conjugale, it was a period-sensitive immersion into the world of a group of Nepal-based hippies. Though ostensibly a crime drama, a focus on drugs and free love brought an exploitation allure.

Reissue CDs Weekly: Gilbert Bécaud

REISSUE CDS WEEKLY: GILBERT BÉCAUD Massive box set dedicated to 'Monsieur 100,000 Volts’

Dauntingly massive box set dedicated to 'Monsieur 100,000 Volts’

Anthologie 1953–2002 is a monster. A 20-disc set spanning almost 50 years, it tracks one of France’s most beloved singers and songwriters. Gilbert Bécaud died in December 2001, but songs from his posthumously released Je Partirai album are included. Fitting, as his music lives on and the release of this box set marks the 15th anniversary of his death.

CD: Bosco Rogers - Post Exotic

CD: BOSCO ROGERS - POST EXOTIC Anglo-French duo’s debut is a psychedelic guitar pop masterpiece

Anglo-French duo’s debut is a psychedelic guitar pop masterpiece

Anyone looking for some psychedelic pop to at least give the illusion that we might now actually be in the middle of summer could do much worse than try out the debut album by Anglo-French duo Bosco Rogers. Their 21st century twist on the Monkees’ good grooves is just what the doctor ordered, and Barth Corbelet and Del Vargas’s sun-drenched harmonies and catchy, fuzzy guitars are guaranteed to generate big smiles and some serious rump-shaking from even the most unconfident of dancers.

Reissue CDs Weekly: Lizzy Mercier Descloux

REISSUE CDS WEEKLY: LIZZY MERCIER DESCLOUX The globe-trotting French autodidact who could have been as big as Madonna

The globe-trotting French autodidact who could have been as big as Madonna

Lizzy Mercier Descloux was an early adopter. In 1975, she travelled from her Paris home to Manhattan and saw The Ramones, Patti Smith, Television and the Richard Hell-edition Heartbreakers. Although the first issue of the New York fanzine Punk came out at the end of the year, punk rock was not yet quite codified. Nonetheless, there was a scene and something new was in the air. Descloux had to check it out and on her return to France, she co-founded the new music monthly Rock News.

theartsdesk in Paris: Peregrinations on the Pigalle

Assorted flavours of France’s music stimulate at the MaMA Festival

Sometimes appearances can be deceptive. The frontman on stage looks as generic it gets. His scruffy beard, retro specs, baseball hat, shapeless jeans and the bulging outline of a mobile phone stuffed in his trouser pocket don’t add up to suggest that his band Tahiti Boy & the Palmtree Family are going to be anything distinctive. But the studied casualness belies what actually takes place musically. This is exceptional.

CD: Syracuse - Liquid Silver Dream

Deceptively simple electropop seductions from French duo

There's a current running through the underground club / electronic music of the 2010s that cares not a jot for progress – but neither is it retro as such. It's been called “outsider house”, which is a pretty lame name for stuff that is often extremely accessible and welcoming, and is certainly not just house music. Rather it's a kind of neo-psychedelia, a sound that plays tricks with memory and expectation, collapsing oppositions between sophistication and naiveté, between kitsch and sincerity, and between low and high fidelity in the pursuit of beautiful discombobulation.

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