The Rodeo - "On the Radio" (2010)

Dorothée Hannequin loves anagrams. She rearranged the letters of her first name to create The Rodeo, the solo persona she adopted after the break-up of her previous band, France’s majestic indie rock shoegaze titans Hopper. Citing the American country music allusions suffused in her new pseudonym, Dorothée announced her departure from the pillowy comfort of Hopper’s sonic lushness by stripping her new songs naked: mostly just acoustic guitar, some piano, and her moody, expressive vocals.

The seven songs on The Rodeo’s “My First EP” (Emergence, 2007) retained Hopper’s emotional power despite this hushed new setting. Dorothée delivered her confrontational lyrics with wrenching emotional bluntness, as the songs encircled various interpersonal proximities, from intimacy to breathless distance to the confusing places in-between.

Meanwhile, the anagrams kept coming. Last year while absorbed in the recording of her full-length debut, Dorothée read a magazine article that referred to a “maelstrom,” a word which at once struck her as a fitting description of her swirling, often turbulent music. Then the letters of “maelstrom” themselves spun around wildly in her mind, resolving to “maestro,” a title with which Dorothée anointed herself in the studio for the duration of the recording, with appropriate measures of authority, delight, and humor. Even after recording, the images stuck: Dorothée named The Rodeo’s new album “Music Maelstrom,” released earlier this year on France’s Emergence Records. And she is still, as she says, the “maestro.”

First single “On The Radio,” is a twisted, bluesy sea shanty, about a love affair so far out to sea that distress calls have no chance of reaching help on the shore. The Rodeo adds new instrumentation—banjo, tambourine, some truly creepy organ—but the music still retains the sparse feel of her earlier solo work. The song boasts what is quite possibly the Rodeo's best chorus, where a haunting, tremolo guitar wails behind Dorothée’s deadpan delivery: “I'm not even dead, but I scream to stay out of this nightmare.”

Recently, Dorothée spoke with Pop de trop in between sets of European tour dates promoting her new record. Here she answers “5 Questions for The Rodeo.”

Congrats on your first full-length, “Music Maelstrom.” How did the recording process differ for a solo release (even though you had friends to help) than when you were in Hopper?
Being in this solo project is obviously quite different from my former band. Decisions are made more easily, there’s no need to practice that much, and when I screw up, I can only take it out on myself.

How long did the record take to complete?

This recording didn’t take months. I wanted something very spontaneous, like a photograph of that moment in my life. Even though many musicians took part in the recording, I’m still the “maestro” when it comes to the final decision!

Talk a little about your process for writing songs: do you write the lyrics first, or the melody, where do you get ideas, do you write on guitar, piano, etc. etc. etc.

Each song is born in my head first. Then I try to remember it for several days. If I still have the song in my head, it means that it’s the right one. Afterwards, the musicians who usually work with me come into the process and give a whole body to the skeleton I’ve created.

How do you decide if you are going to write lyrics in French or English?

I’ve always listened to music written in English. This comes from my musical backgrounds. Even my family used to make me listen to bands like Pink Floyd, The Supremes, The Doors… It’s also just a question of the sound of the words. I think that English fits better with my music.

Who are some of your favorite musicians that you look to for inspiration?

One of my favorite singers is Otis Redding. In fact, I’ve always been impressed by artists with guts, artists who really live through their music: vulnerable people, open-hearted people. One of my favorites today is maybe Jack White. He’s a good songwriter and he’s also inspired by different arts. He is not afraid of doing mainstream collaborations and he’s not stuck in the 60’s or 70’s, as his music might suggest.

click the image below to listen to song previews or buy the album:

Marie-Flore - "Sweet to the Taste" (2009)

Let's face it: I'm no rock critic. Last week's fawning, superlative review of my now-beloved Le Prince Miiaou illustrates my unwillingness (inability?) to explore the music I like from the inside out. Instead, I swallow whole the bio's backstory, quite happy to orbit the permanent, unmoving celestial bodies in some kind of pre-Copernican celestial construct, where the artist calls the shots and I just connect the stars' dots.

Anyway. This week isn't going to be much different.

Or is it? I bought Marie-Flore's 2009 EP, "More Than Thirty Seconds If You Please," and the liner notes contain very little received wisdom for me to rapturously repeat. But check it: Marie-Flore's tousled mullet and black-underscored eyes make her a ringer for "Brass in Pocket"-era Chrissie Hynde, and she sings like a delicate Polly Jean Harvey fronting an analog Portishead.

EP opener "Trapdoor" (which I almost chose for this post) is a brazen declaration of brittle fragility. I can't help but notice, as someone who's trying to talk about Marie-Flore, the chorus' laconic line "Well, you probably don't know me that well," while a sad, trumpet-like wordless backing vocal emits a gorgeous, deflated wail.

Broken ballad "Sweet to the Taste" is a marvel; a Pop de Trop chart-topper. The song opens with a deceptive hush before turning towards its full-disclosure pre-chorus: "If I'm sweet to the taste, I can get sour." The lyric's poetry workshop sincerity belies the claustrophobic regret with which Marie-Flore sings it. This is no preemptive, told-you-so warning shot from a serial commitment-phobe. Instead, she sounds morbidly apologetic, a Dr. Jekyll begging for forgiveness even as he's changing into Mr. Hyde.

At the chorus, the song itself transforms: percussive handclaps jump out and startle, the sound you'd make to scare off a cat. Marie-Flore's overdubbed backing vocals sing something that sounds like "Ow, ow" as she repeats the line "Now go outside, because you block my view." A quietly distorted, staccato guitar points toward the door on a single note.

Seconds later, the song simmers down. "Handle me with care, my man," Marie-Flore implores.

After all, if she's sour to the taste, she can get sweet.

click the image below to listen to song previews or buy the album:

Le Prince Miiaou - "Football Team" (2009)

A self-described awkward introvert, Maud-Elisa Mandeau, mastermind behind the dramatic indie-rock alter-ego "Le Prince Miiaou," is no stranger to alienation. Growing up in the backwater town of Jonzac in southwestern France, the young Mandeau drifted from scene to scene and hobby to hobby, never quite clicking with anything she tried.

Then her brother, on a whim, asked her to sing in his metal band. She was 15 years old.

To hear Mandeau tell it, that's when she discovered a passion that she'd never before experienced. Devoting her life to music, she embraced every facet of her new obsession, finding joy in such mundane tasks as changing guitar strings and learning music software on her laptop.

After secondary school, she moved to Paris to continue her education, but music came first. As she got to know the city's competitive music scene, she developed her character "Le Prince Miiaou" to help boost her confidence onstage. The more outrageous her persona became, the more it fueled her songwriting. (My favorite of Miiaou's outfits: combination snorkel mask and little red riding hood cape!)

After a strong self-released debut that, without label support, attracted critical praise in France, Le Prince Miiaou released her second album, "Safety First," in 2009. Joined by Norbert Labrousse (drums) and François-Pierre Fol (cello, bass), Mandeau builds on her debut across all areas: singing, guitar playing, and, yes, overall confidence (the snorkel mask is clearly working).

The costumes may be goofy, but Le Prince Miiaou means business. She sings like Cat Power's Chan Marshall fronting a slightly more refined version of the White Stripes. The band approaches authenticity without getting stuck in retro-themed formalist poses. In fact the most "classic" characteristic of "Safety First" is its thrilling consistency: the back-to-back-to-back excellence of the songs recalls the heyday of the LP-as-art.

Still, Mandeau's sense of alienation has been hard to shake. The plaintive "Football Team" channels the heartbreak of an outsider's sour-grapes loneliness using two chords, Mandeau's gorgeous voice, and the repeated chant "They don't want me on their football team." The guitar swells, the cello cries, and even that snorkel mask gets a little foggy.

click the image below to listen to song previews or buy the album:

Coming Soon - "Home from the Blues" (2008)

Coming Soon, one of France's most exciting indie folk/pop bands, hails from the culturally and geographically isolated town of Annecy. Imagine a great new band bursting out of Michigan's Upper Peninsula: you'd certainly expect, thanks to the interwebs, the band to be fully attuned to any number of current musical sub-genres; you might also predict a certain free-wheeling mixing and matching of influences and ideas that expose the remoteness of the musicians' origins—like a rare Galapagos finch developing more colorful tail feathers during the course of its evolution in an isolated environment.

The tail feathers of Coming Soon have got some serious color. Now based in Paris, the young band (whose members now range in age from a tender 17 to an able-to-drive-the-tour-bus 28) was inspired by the previous decade's American anti-folk scene and its stylistic antecedents. Originally a trio, the core members adopted vibrant nicknames (Leo Bear Creek, Ben Lupus, and Billy Jet Pilot) and began writing songs, recruiting friends into Coming Soon as the band developed. By the time their debut cd, “New Grids” was finished, the band had expanded to seven members, each with his or her own nickname and persona.

Like many debut albums recorded quickly (5 days!), “New Grids” is jam-packed with great ideas. Not all of them are fully realized, but the band's enthusiasm and joy in experimenting more than compensate. From the space-age 12-bar blues opener "Memento Mori" (in which the band members helpfully count down the bars during the chord changes) to the rousing, gather-your-friends album closer "What You've Left Behind," "New Grids" wears its twee/shambolic influences proudly. The album respectfully conjures Jonathan Richman, Calvin Johnson's Beat Happening, Half Japanese, Pavement (whose "Crooked Rain"-era fuzzy guitar tone is borrowed throughout), and the Shop Assistants with a smart mixture of hero-worship and springboard.

The dizzy indie spin of "Home from the Blues" is the kind of song that Beck, another sonic touchpoint for Coming Soon, would have put his other foot in the grave to have written: ("This morning I felt Hamlet baking up a pie / for my mother's new wedding, oh man she is wild"). The song, about gulping in the fresh air of freedom, bounces from image to scattershot image behind a lurching drum beat; the guitar sounds like the Basement Tapes if the only amp Dylan had owned was a 15-watt Peavey. By the time the chorus resolves into its clincher "I'm home from the blues, wait till I'm loose," Coming Soon have successfully created an entire world—as far from Annecy as from any other place on earth.

click the image below to listen to song previews or buy the album:

France Gall - "Mes premières vraies vacances" (1964)

French pop music’s extraordinary contribution to the Swingin’ Sixties, yé-yé extracted the conflicted sexual bravado of the earliest rock and roll girl groups (think a tamer Shangri-La’s or a wilder Ronettes) and infused the music with Paris youth culture’s headlong rush toward freedom (individual and collective) and maturity (same). A complicated, often contradictory musical narrative, yé-yé was nonetheless progressive in that it rejected previous French musical traditions, its iconic figures were women, and it widened the global definition of what made for exhilarating rock and roll.

Named for the ecstatic shouts of “yeah!” by rapt audience members (similar to the way British journalists often referenced the “Yeah Yeah Yeah” chorus of “She Loves You” in their headlines to convey the fervor Beatlemania inspired), yé-yé enjoyed its earliest success in a radio show segment called “Sweetheart of the Week.” DJ Daniel Philippacci spun a new track by a young, female singer; French record buyers did the rest. Most of the records featured on “Sweetheart” sailed straight to Number One on the sales charts. As the movement grew, the most popular yé-yé singers (Sylvie Vartan, Françoise Hardy, Sheila—no last name necessary, thank you—and France Gall) became bona fide celebrities, expanding their hegemony into acting, fashion, and—significantly—greater creative autonomy for their music careers. Ultimately, the genre’s superstars transcended yé-yé, becoming enduring icons in the French pop cultural landscape.

Filling the “kid sister” role among yé-yé singers with her sweet voice and innocent eyes, France Gall was 16 years old when her first single set fire to French radio in 1963. Her early career was navigated by her father, Robert Gall, a lyricist who’d sniffed out pop music’s shifting demographics at the dawn of the 1960’s. A producer friend of Robert’s suggested that France sing a new composition by songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, whose own career at that time was sputtering into early retirement. Released as Gall’s second single, Gainsbourg’s “N'écoute pas les idoles” became a huge hit, cementing France Gall’s popularity and single-handedly reviving Gainsbourg’s flattening professional prospects.

For better or for worse, the success of “Idoles” also bound Gall to Gainsbourg’s material. Almost 20 years her senior, the infamously louche Gainsbourg provided Gall with material that relied on salacious sexual double-entendres (often, allegedly, without the teenaged Gall’s knowledge). Gainsbourg’s “Poupée de cire poupée de son” won Gall the prestigious Eurovision Song Content in 1965, but the songwriter's glib cynicism slunk around in lyrics that obliged Gall to question whether she should be singing about love when she knew nothing about boys.

Even more notorious was Gainsbourg’s “Les sucettes,” which the teen thought was simply about a girl who loved to suck on lollipops. The scandal that blossomed in the wake of the song’s release knocked Gall’s career temporarily off course. Perhaps not surprisingly, the scandal had the opposite effect on Gainsbourg’s popularity: launched into the stratosphere, Gainsbourg settled permanently into his dirty-old-man persona, scored his own hit single with his classic “Je t'aime... moi non plus” with Jane Birkin, and never looked back. Gall, meanwhile, refused to work with Gainsbourg again and thereafter began to exercise greater control in choosing her material. At one point, she traveled to Germany to work with a young Giorgio Moroder, almost a decade before his own star-making turn as the svengali behind Donna Summer’s disco career.

Gall’s career never quite recovered. In part, the 60’s were coming to a close and the yé-yé movement had peaked. Similar to the freeze-out felt by the squeaky-clean Beach Boys as they found themselves labeled increasingly irrelevant by their fellow musicians in the bourgeoning counterculture, France Gall and the other yé-yé singers—who had kicked off the decade as an invigorating break from sedate 50’s pop music—came to be viewed as unfashionable by France’s ascendant prog-rock bands.

France Gall’s musical legacy endures. One of the most tender of Gall’s songs, 1964’s “Mes premières vraies vacances” (“My first real vacation”), captures the youthful idealism that radiated out of Gall’s best work. Written by Jacques Jean Marie Datin and Maurice Vidalin, the song describes a young girl daydreaming about an upcoming vacation—the first without her parents. She longs to walk barefoot, and imagines a boy she’d like to meet: if he wants to take her on a boat ride, or buy her stuff, that’s ok. But if he “asks too much… not ok.” Just because she’s a yé-yé girl doesn’t mean she can’t say no.

click the image below to listen to song previews or buy the album:

Marion Cotillard (with Franz Ferdinand) - "Eyes of Mars" (2010)

I had been drifting off to sleep while listening to a podcast when I heard “Eyes of Mars” for the first time earlier this week. Needless to say, the jolt that shook me as soon as this song kicked in blasted the sleep right out of my head. I had no idea who was singing or playing the instruments; my best guess was that some young, impressively polished French indie band was tearing into an obscure Kate Bush song that I’d never heard before.

The reality is far juicier. Last year, Oscar-winning actress and all-around 21st-century heroine Marion Cotillard, having proven her exquisite vocal chops in decidedly non-rock settings (conveying Edith Piaf’s melancholy and infinite sadness in “La Vie En Rose,” partying with Hollywood A-listers while singing tightly choreographed Broadway-style numbers in “Nine”), was approached by fashion giant Dior to serve as the face for their “Lady Dior” advertising campaign. Wanting more than a mere photo shoot for billboards and magazine spreads, Dior wrapped an entire persona around Cotillard—the enigmatic “Lady Rouge,” a character created for Dior by designer John Galliano—and commissioned a mini-movie for the campaign.

Enter the slick indie rock fashion plates Franz Ferdinand. Tapped to provide a song for Lady Rouge to sing in the film, they contributed “Eyes of Mars,” for which Cotillard nailed the lead vocals with exactly the kind of detached cool that has been the purview of Alex Kapranos and Company since they declared themselves the “new Scottish gentry” back in 2003. In short: yeah, Cotillard can sing the hell out of rock too.

Kapranos must have had a hunch about Cotillard’s not-just-for-showtunes skills, because “Eyes of Mars” is a weird, complex song that shimmers through multiple key changes—in odd places—and pivots with intense dynamic shifts that a lesser singer would likely have botched. Cotillard’s breathy, full-voweled soprano (which does recall Kate Bush in places, particularly during the song’s spookily hushed intro) inhabits the song’s pull towards the chaotic with a strong sense of inner stability—Lady Rouge may be getting sucked into a maelstrom, but she’s still got enough wits about her to comment on its beauty as she spins. Even more, Cotillard is enough of a self-aware 21st-century heroine to be able to get away with infusing the line “we’re selling our dreams to you all” with a perfectly furtive smirk.

That said, the song isn’t for sale, but the streamable video is big-budget amazing (although I’m surprised that Dior used faceless, floppy-haired actors for Lady Rouge’s backing band rather than employ Franz Ferdinand themselves). Watch it over and over again (as I’ve been) here:

Marc Lavoine - "Pour Une Biguine Avec Toi" (1983)

In his early 20’s, Marc Lavoine embarked on a career as an actor, mostly landing roles in serial television. In the early- to mid-80’s he scored a few back-to-back hits on the pop music charts (sometimes writing his own material) and quickly attained much more success as a musician than he’d tasted as an actor. His telegenic looks didn’t hurt this transition, which, of course, coincided with the mushrooming global popularity of music videos.

The eerie Rick Springfield comparisons end right there, however. Marc Lavoine most certainly does not reside in a dusty “Where Is He Now?” file of unremembered 80’s video-hit wonders. In fact, as I write this entry, 2009’s “Volume Ten,” Lavoine’s tenth studio album (not counting live albums and compilations) remains ensconced in the French Top Ten Album Charts (nudged out of the highest spots only by the likes of worldwide phenoms Lady Gaga, Michael Bublé, and the Black Eyed Peas). The only time Rick Springfield has ever shared anything with Lady Gaga or the Black Eyed Peas has been in this sentence.

Ok, so having established that Lavoine remains a relevant, pop music elder statesman in France, one who continues to sell lots of records, let me again bounce back to those early days. I had wanted to write about something from “Volume Ten,” but I kept getting sucked into Lavoine’s earliest hits, particularly 1983’s “Pour Une Biguine Avec Toi,” in which Lavoine delivers an absolute classic—on only his second single.

From a 2010 vantage point, “Biguine” is pure 80’s sonic nostalgia: Lavoine’s earnest, growly vocals channel the dude from Simple Minds, the reverb-drenched guitar presages “Boys of Summer,” each chorus explodes with Psychedelic Furs-style keyboard-as-xylophone. Meanwhile, the heart-on-the-sleeve lyrics tally a list of all the things the singer would readily give up for a shot at the girl he’s got his eye on (possibly worrisome for said girl: his toothbrush made the list). Close your eyes, though, and you can see Molly Ringwald doing her library detention dance during Lavoine’s “Doo do-doot doo doo” vocal break after the chorus. Marc Lavoine: Where Is He Now? At the top of the charts, right where he’s always been…

click the image below to listen to song previews or buy the album: