Yé-Yé Of The Day: Camille

A few weeks ago while poking around at the Les Inrockuptibles website, I was pleasantly surprised to notice that Camille released Le Fil, her second solo record, last month.

Camille is one of my favourite vocalists of the musical French nouvelle vague, as well as the voice of four songs from the...errr...Nouvelle Vague record that everyone was talking about a few months ago. The NV website calls her "one of the most talented French vocalists of all time," and it isn't kidding. On her first album, Le Sac Des Filles (released in 2002), Camille's crystalline voice ducks, jumps, and explodes like a bossa nova Roman candle. This is a vocal virtuoso, not some lame Whitney Houston wannabe from American Idol. This is for real.

The recording of "Ruby" is spare and lo-fi, just acoustic guitar and vocals, and thus completely non-representative of the rest of Le Sac Des Filles. I had no choice but to include the song, though, because its beauty compels me.

"La Douleur," on the other hand, is very typical of Le Fil. Perhaps it has something to do with the album's title--fil means "thread" or "line." Throughout each song, a sustained tone can be heard, perhaps originating from a synthesiser, and this tone seems to tie all the songs together. Most of the songs also use vocal percussion of some kind, so that there are very few instruments besides voice and the drone in the background.

P.S. "1, 2, 3" is featured on the second Le Pop compilation, which I really can't recommend enough if you are curious about the sound of modern-day French pop music. I've fallen in love with half the musicians on that album since I first heard it.