Halfset are without doubt one of the least known of the Choice Music Prize nominees: a brief mention here, a support slot there... But with Another Way of Being There, the band's second album, and...

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With Sea Saw, Lisa Hannigan has finally broken her last ties with Damien Rice and established herself as an artist worth watching. Her nomination for the Choice Music Prize is unneeded proof of her ac...

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Carly Sings (live in La Bellevilloise, Paris)

Review Snapshot: Despite incessant audience noise and diabolical sound problems, which she really should just put aside, Carly Sings pulls out a strong performance of fine material - including some promising new songs.

The Cluas Verdict? 7 out of 10

Full Review:
Tonight’s venue, a trendy music bar in the slightly bohemian 20th district of Paris, is full of lively punters out for a good time. For Carly Sings, this is bad news indeed.

You see, La Bellevilloise is fashionable because its clientele like to hang out here and chat with friends while having live music in the background as sonic wallpaper. By the bar it’s standing room only, as packed and noisy as a Friday evening train station. The disinterested audience din is overwhelming, quite possibly the loudest we’ve ever heard at a concert.

More used to dedicated Dublin listeners, Carly Blackman is up against it tonight. You’d hardly call her loud, confrontational or in-your-face. Even before the show starts she already looks nervous – we reckon she has family and friends in the audience. Added to that, her live set-up (with Ben and Guillaume on guitar and bass/cello) is plagued by technical problems; at some moments the sound seems to have been mixed with a blender. While singing, Blackman glares up at where the back wall meets the ceiling, and you wonder how someone can sing so clearly through gritted teeth. This wouldn’t be a good time to go bothering her about anything.

Between songs, though, she relaxes and tries to make light of the night’s adversity. When she asks the crowd to stop talking, she’s half-joking – but only half-joking.

And yet, despite all this, Carly Sings puts on an enjoyable performance. Those tracks from ‘The Glove Thief’, her debut album, still sound beguiling. The musical mixture of pop, jazz, chanson française and bossa nova is rich and evocative, like a specially-blended tea from far-off lands. And her lyrics feature strong visual imagery that complement the sparse arrangements – in a room where it’s hard to be heard, such directness is all the more necessary and welcome. In particular, ‘George Emerson’ rises above the racket like a hot-air balloon.

One thing: for someone who’s spent a lot of time in Lyon and Paris, Blackman’s French isn’t great tonight. Apart from singing ‘L’Amour’, around halfway she gives up the between-song banter en français and continues in English. But she said she was tired. (Not that this is a language exam or anything. Just saying, like.)

Of more interest than her French level are her new songs. She closes the set with two: the folksy ‘No Good Girl’ and ‘Jason Rising’. Both are up to the high standard of her previous work and that bodes well for the second Carly Sings album, which should hopefully be released in September.

Difficult second album? It can’t be as hard on Blackman as this bloody concert!

Aidan Curran

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From here on in, Short Cuts is going to change tack a little... as well as bringing you the good stuff that bubbles up here in Oz (I see that NME gave Empire of the Sun 8/10 earlier this month... see this earlier blog), I'll be providing a First View on some of the premier releases of the year. 

And what better place to start than U2's new release, No Line on the Horizon.

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Do you remember our recent trip to the edge of the world (i.e. a remote Paris satellite town) to see cult French electro-chappie Bertrand Burgalat in concert? And how we mentioned his special guest that night, April March? And how we’d write about her in more detail, such is her all-round interestingness?

Well, your memory is better than ours. Your blogger had to be viciously prodded by an impatient reader about following up that one. So anyway:

You might know April March (right) for a song called ‘Chick Habit’. This hipswinging number featured on the fine soundtrack to Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Death Proof’, thus guaranteeing it cult status, and has since been used on a TV ad for the Renault Twingo (a quintessentially Parisian car). The song is March’s English-language adaptation of ‘Laisser Tomber Les Filles’, one of Serge Gainsbourg’s many hit compositions for France Gall.

But who is April March?

Well, we’re disappointed to say that April March is only her nom de pop; her real name is Elinore Blake. But she has a definite talent for names – before becoming April March, Blake was in bands called The Pussywillows (whose live line-up featured Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo) and The Shitbirds. Yes!

As a schoolgirl in California, Blake became obsessed with France and spent time here on a school exchange programme. Transforming herself into the pop butterfly that is April March, she has maintained this infatuation. ‘Chick Habit’ comes from a 1999 album called ‘Chrominance Decoder’ (here she loses her naming talent a little) that revisits Gainsbourg’s early-‘60s yéyé period of innuendo-laden twist-pop written for the naïve young Gall, who still admits that at the time she never realised what ‘Les Sucettes’ was about. An earlier March album, ‘Gainsbourgsion’ (okay, she’s clearly better with pseudonyms and band names than album titles) features both ‘Chick Habit’ and ‘Laisser Tomber Les Filles’, as well as other Serge artifacts from that era.

March is signed to Burgalat’s Tricatel label, which explains why she’s a guest in his concert. Thin and frail, she seems quite nervous and unsure as she walks on stage to join Burgalat and his band. But she acquits herself well. Her part of the show ends with a cracking performance of ‘Chick Habit’; the sparse crowd can go home happy.

(Trivia: Blake is a cartoonist and was once the principal animator on ‘Ren and Stimpy’, and she drew Madonna in the title sequence and video for ‘Who’s That Girl’. And let’s not forget that she was in a band called The Shitbirds.)

You can check out more retro French pop on April March’s MySpace page. There’s no official video for ‘Chick Habit’, so we’ll show you one of her other songs. A loving recreation of both ‘60s French pop and ‘60s French ‘scopitone’ pop videos, here’s April March with ‘Mignonette’:

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