Madeleine Peyroux
Careless Love

THE REVIEW

The cover is not inviting at all: the girl is sitting in a dingy alley, barefoot, with dirty feet and swollen ankles. A sulky face of an arrogant and presumptuous French girl (in reality Madeleine is American, from Athens, Georgia). But Peyroux is still linked to France: she lived in Paris for a long time and played on the streets of the Latin Quarter.

How's the album? First of all, how many times have we heard a new artist being labeled as "the So-and-so of 2000" or "the Such-and-such of the new millennium"? It's the usual story of crying wolf... who will believe me now when I say that Madeleine Peyroux is nothing less than the reincarnation of Billie Holiday? The tone and modulation of her voice, that blues cadence... Between the bars is her Strange Fruit, Lonesome Road is her Travelin' Light. Did Billie Holiday have the gardenia? Madeleine has the daisy.

Sure, the girl adds her own touch, playing the guitar and writing one of the 12 tracks on the album, which consists of covers. Songs of the present (Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan) and the past (W.C. Handy - the father of Blues), all arranged with a very fresh approach to jazz and blues. Nothing artistically extravagant, yet the album proves to be entirely coherent. Wrapped in a sound that is both compact and light at the same time, Careless Love eagerly gives way to the enticing words that flow from Billie's mouth, oops! I mean Madeleine's.