Cat and mouse

Image: miracle moods

I'm Gonna Catch Me a Rat - Fabienne Delsol

Le Roi Des Fourmis - Fabienne Delsol

Fabienne Delsol makes me want to push a button and rewind the year a bit. Just to the beginning of June, just so I can bookend Summer 2007 mixtapes with her saucy nouvelle ye-ye covers and originals. Close hewing to the more historically codified pop genres is risky. Too often it's productive of staid formalist exercises and earnest set pieces of unintentionally amusing anachronism. But Delsol brings such glee and gusto to her songs, such charm! such life! that you fold those concerns neat and stow them away for another day. You're in good hands here.

"I'm Gonna Catch Me a Rat" slinks with Fever and Boots Made for Walking, with sultry swelter and swagger, with a wink of cartooned cat-and-mouse (faux) peril. "Le Roi Des Foumis" (King of the Ants, after this) is a blend of breezed singsong and petulant patent-leathered stamp -- a cheer and lament for the lovelorn and insignificant (proudly insignificant) of this world. But mostly it's about those rumbling runaway drums, their glorious clattering-clack-racket rumpus, their heart-jump and lurch.

From Between You and Me (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace

And:
Another excellent chapter in La Blogothèque's Take Away Show series: Circled by foliage and bathed in Paris sunshine, Gravenhurst's Nick Talbot plays the band's beautifully melodic and melancholy new single, "Trust."