Joining the long list of actresses (Brigitte Bardot, Anna Karina, Mireille Darc, Jane Birkin, Catherine Deneuve) maestro Serge Gainsbourg loved to make sing, Isabelle Adjani put out a single self-titled album, released in 1983 – the very year she set the box office on fire with Jean Becker's L'Eté Meurtrier (One Deadly Summer). All that essentially remained of it was one hit, "Pull Marine," and its widely circulated video by Luc Besson; a sad and beautiful little-known song ("Le Mal intérieur"); and two famous bits of wordplay ("J'suis dans un état proche de l'Ohio" and "Beau, oui comme Bowie"). Its release suffered from competing with Baby Alone in Babylone, the first album recorded by Jane Birkin after her separation from Gainsbourg, featuring the same team of British musicians. Even their themes were similar: chaos created by romantic relationships.
After 40 years, Adjani is releasing an unexpected follow-up with Bande Originale, the fruit of her collaboration with Pascal Obispo and his lyricist Lionel Florence. Initiated in 2006, then suspended, the project resumed with the involvement of electronic musician DeLaurentis, aka Cécile Léogé. This chaotic gestation, mixing vintage and new vocal takes, finds cinematic unity right from the "Prelude," with dramatic strings and the deep voice of Peter Murphy (lead singer of the British goth band Bauhaus) announcing "l'histoire d'une actrice" ("the story of an actress").
What follows is a series of long-distance duets with an all-male accompaniment. And a motley crew, to say the least, including French pop greats (Etienne Daho, as well as Benjamin Biolay for "Il ne manque plus que tu me manques," a success); veterans of British new wave (Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran, and David Sylvian); and Senegalese star Youssou N'Dour, whose vocals are artificially laid over "D'accord," as is rapper Akhenaton's flow on "Seule." Plus there are three ghostly contributions, from the late singers Christophe, Daniel Darc (with a line, "J'ai menti pour m'en tirer" – "I lied to get away with it" – that could have been written by Gainsbourg), and Philippe Pascal (from the groups Marquis de Sade and Marc Seberg). And then there's Obispo himself, whose vocal interventions add to the confusion.
Japanese influence
The overall emphasis on the atmosphere at the cost of melody is strongly colored by the 1980s and 1990s, with new age sounds (reminiscent of the music in Le Grand Bleu [The Big Blue], trip-hop and even French touch in "Les Courants d'air," with the vocals of Adjani and Gaëtan Roussel treated with a vocoder in a nod to Daft Punk. After "Samourai," the instrumental interlude "Shamisen," named after the Japanese lute, steers the album toward a Japanese sound, solidified by "Hara-Kiri," a Peter Gabriel pastiche with British returnee Seal, and "Japan Airlines," with its introduction whispered by Adjani in the language of Mishima. More generally, it takes inspiration from the hybridizations of the composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died in March 2023.
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