ANNE PIGALLE ’Everything Could Be So Perfect …’ (ZTT19)☆☆☆☆☆
AHH LURKED add err vote-o-graph, eye urd err voice, and well, you know what broken French accents are like. They tingle with lustful delight and invite you into their brittle, sophisticated world of mystery and intrigue. Lust eventually subsides, but I confess to loving Anne Pigalle’s album.
My expectation was to be transported into a stark ‘60s influenced black and white Paris underworld cabaret, where choking cigarette smoke engulfs a lifestyle of illicit love, infidelity and doom. But hey! the surprise is that there is no surprise —
Why shiver me timbers, the ghost of Jacques Brel returns to haunt the whole of side one. But there’s more. The sinister continental shadow of Tom Waits circus sleaze on ‘Intermission’, through a whirling middle European gypsy underbelly to modern day Nico (‘A Crack In The Ocean’).
A dark, moody, clinging web is woven as Pigalle glides from track to track, embracing all the cliched terms of reference we reserve for foreign females —
Ronnie Randall