Paris Combo
Motifs

THE REVIEW

The French have already contributed. That is why today they rely on eclecticism. Or perhaps, the French are contributing. And maybe that's why today they present us with their cosmopolitan vibrations. Their inherent imperialism is felt in their most contemporary musical twists. Words like “contamination” or “influence” make little sense when alongside the interpretative level of a group like the Paris Combo, multicultural by chance. The pillaging of exotic atmospheres both near and far is perpetrated with the proverbial nonchalance from across the Alps. The atmospheres, wonders from the world, are bent with a hypnotic work of soft "Frenchification". It happens that culturally distant environments undergo the erotic shaping implanted on the more bourgeois whims and become, thus, albums like this "Motifs" (2005) where, amidst the babel of origins, the charm of the dominant communication code emerges without any violence. French, indeed.

So that when you listen in the warmth of a glass (Italian, no less) to the work of the five based in Paris, it seems like different national prides have lost their identity. But not themselves. The chanson commands the yielding foreign music that is initiated to snobbery, in atmospheres reminiscent of an opera by Édouard-Henri Avril, where the ancestral and inherent bohemian spirit manifests itself elegantly and affectedly in its simultaneously pornographic contemporary virulence, in a sort of heretical modernism.

But let's stop at the eroticism. The samba, the bossanova, the swing, the jazz, the dolce vita music, the tango are mocked and seduced by the thoughtful and surrealist walk through Montmartre of Henry Miller. The means used to achieve the coercion's goal are quickly mentioned: the female voice of a gallery owner like Belle du Berry, facade arrangements but lots of good manners, an abundance of arrogant softness in handling the less composite scores. On the surface, the album has no pretensions. It is only when it has slowly convinced you of its allure that it ends and you think you have lost it. Guitar, bass, banjo, drums, trumpet, piano, and an effeminate African male voice, designed to artfully seduce female listeners.

World music à la française, for these progressives enlightened by the savviest conservatism