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Felicia Atkinson with Sylvain Chauveau
Roman Anglais
O Rosa Records
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Article
written by James S
Mar 27, 2008.
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Your music geek discussion for the evening: Where do you draw the line of definition between an album and an EP? Joanna Newsom’s ‘Ys’ had five tracks weighing in at over 50 minutes; that’s an album, right. And her handily-titled ‘Ys Street Band EP’ was just three songs but still lasted over 25 minutes. So, using this dubiously unscientific scale, where does that leave a four track CD running for 40 minutes, then? Discuss.
Or, maybe, don’t. On the off-chance that you have a girlfriend, she probably won’t like it. She might also be puzzled by the contents of ’Roman Anglais’, the first fruits of a collaboration between Parisian artist/poet/songwriter Atkinson and modern composer and fellow in-Seine native, Chauveau.
Opener Aberdeen sees Atkinson breathily listing various world cities over a shimmering guitar motif that doesn’t actually go anywhere. The way she insouciantly intones the titular town somehow manages to make the north of Scotland sound as sexy as the North Bank.
How The Light features more acoustic loveliness and a similar penchant for mixing lyrics in both French and English, and only occasionally Franglais. Probably pretentious prose it may be, but it’s also as soothing and serene as a hot bath after a hard day working down the local garlic factory followed by a long cycle home in your best stripey jumper and beret.
In fairness, the lyrics are often secondary to the haunting loveliness of Chauveau’s minimalist musical palette; which is probably for the best by the time you get to the title track’s epic and disturbing tale of the most loveless Gallic blow job since The Brown Bunny. To get this far, you’ll also have to have been able to stomach a seven-minute stretch of mechanical beeping on Dans La Lumiere, seemingly designed to replicate the effect of tinnitus.
Like the album as a whole, if you open your ears and mind to something a bit different, even this is really quite captivating. I don’t think I’ll ever convince my girlfriend of that either, mind.
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