Party Ends: sing it a-gainsbourg

I love French shit. My wife and I went to Paris for our honeymoon and America has never been the same since. Between Uffie and Air, there is no way to deny that France is an integral beam in the structure of hot, five minutes fast music.

But there is also such heritage there. The same way that Parisians don't tear down their beautiful buildings, they just gut them and build from the inside (hint hint America!), so Charlotte Gainsbourg's newest offering hearkens back to neo-modern French pop, building a classic structure supported by modern elements. 5:55's brick and mortar is Gainsbourg's overtly Frenchy vocals, drifting from French to English. whispery, powerful, and fiendishly sexy, internally crisscrossed by the 2x4's of timeless instrumentation, rhythmic and airy (no pun intended, as the music for the album is written and performed by Air), utilizing the simultaneous kitch and class of the inherent (also no pun intended) sound of descending from decades of a well defined musical essence. Of course, it is very easy to draw comparisons to both her father Serge, and her mother Jane Birkin, because, well, she sort of has a mash of both of their sounds, but it's unfair to put them side by side. Give Charolette a chance on her own, and you might find something beyond those parallels.

I have yet to hear the entire album, so I'm drawing no conclusions about the package overall, but I really like what I've heard so far, and with lyrics by Jarvis Cocker and the Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon and in studio production by Nigel Godrich (who has also worked with Air in the past), I kind of expect this to be pretty damn good.

We all fell in love with her in The Science of Sleep, now maybe we will all fall in love with her music too... here's hoping.

MP3: Charlotte Gainsbourg- AF607105