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Dom Robinson reviews
EMI 
Le Fil: 
Nouvelle Vague:
- Released: June 2006
- Rating: 4/10
- Cat.no: 094636831121
Looking like a young Daphne Zuniga, Camille‘svoice will be familiar to fans of Nouvelle Vague, whose album Vol.1 was a series of cover versionsof a wide variety of tracks, some classics, such as I Melt With You, In A Manner Of Speaking,some just pop hits, e.g. Making Plans for Nigel, Teenage Kicks, and some about as obscure forthis type of cover version as you could get, namely, Psyche by PJ & Duncan (aka Ant & Dec) andThe Dead Kennedy’s Too Drunk To Fuck, but all coming across perfectly and actually sounding 100%right in the way they ended up.
Another highlight on that album was the opener, Love Will Tear Us Apart, a cover version of theJoy Division classic, also used in a recent episode of Sugar Rush, with the beach ambience usedin that song complementing the outside Brighton Pier scene perfectly as a solitary Kim realised she’djust stuffed up her relationship with Saint. On its own, so good and so emotional the song, quitefrankly, is enough to make you cry, such is the plane it can take you to.
Hence, when I read that the singer of all those tracks, Camille, had made her own solorecord, Le Fil – which translates as “The Wire” and was released last year in France and put outover here in June 2006, I wanted to hear it immediately. Sadly, I was in for a massive disappointmentby comparison.
It’s not an easy album to warm to. After listening to the first couple of tracks, La jeune fille auxcheveux blancs (The Young Girl with the White Hair) and the funky Ta douleur (Your Pain),it’s clear it’s setting a tone that then prevails throughout the album, not least with the constant humin the background throughout all the songs. Following this, tracks include three similar, short, fastpieces each called Janine, but we only get some promise showing when we get to Baby CarniBird and that only tends to get going a little bit and at too late in the song.
It’s undeniable that Camille’s voice has a soft, lilting texture to it which has to be heard to bebelieved, some of this coming out best in Pour que l’amour me quitte (For The Love Who Leaves Me),but overall there’s just so little substance to the majority of the songs on this album. It’s almostlike a rap-cum-acapella album with the style of singing coming across as the former but with the latterbeing used too often and the backing music sometimes sounds like Pete from the Big Brother house bangingon anything he can find.
In the second half of the album, only Au Port stood out at the time of listening, but now theaural inspection is complete I can’t remember a single moment of it.
There are too many songs and all too short, ranging anything from 52 seconds, with the longest being3:58, totalling just over 71 minutes. Well, I thought it was 71 mins long, but then the last track,Quand je marche is down as being 38:59, but it’s really about 3:45 of actual song and the restbeing the aforementioned continuous hum, which seems rather a pointless way to fill a CD. There could besomething to wait for at the end of it all, like those CDs with a ‘trick ending’ that you get sometimes,but I didn’t get that far by a long shot and I’d had enough of it by then.
Maybe I just can’t pick up on the hooks because it’s all in French? Doubtful as I got into the onlyother French track that springs to mind, MC Solaar’s Nouveau Western, albeit from 1994, to greatenjoyment. However, this offering from Camille just doesn’t grab me in the same way the Nouvelle Vaguetracks did. And, unfortunately, albeit similarly to MC Solaar, I haven’t got a clue what she’s singingabout, picking up the odd word here and there but as we know from the Nouvelle Vague Vol.I albumthat she can speak English then I wish we’d had such a version in this country.
Website:Camille – Le Fil.com
Video link:Click here for Video
The full track listing is as follows :
1. La jeune fille aux cheveux blancs
2. Ta douleur
3. Assise
4. Janine I
5. Vous
6. Baby Carni Bird
7. Pour que l’amour me quitte
8. Senza
9. Janine II
10. Vertige
11. Au port
12. Janine III
13. Pâle septembre
14. Rue de Ménilmontant
15. Quand je marcheReview copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2006.
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.