These two albums by Isabelle Antena show how easy it is for an artist to lose everything that makes them interesting. On a Warm Summer Night (Tous mes Caprices) is an artifact from a time best forgotten while L’Alphabet du Plaisir, the 'best of' compilation, also contains a lot of stinkers but also enough good pieces that show that Antena wasn’t always crap.
LTM
The reissue of On a Warm Summer Night (Tous mes Caprices) is a chore to listen to. All of the music sounds like it was programmed by someone who hates music. It is a blend of easy listening jazz and Latin rhythms, now sounds extremely dated. I can just imagine a bunch of yuppies from a Bret Easton Ellis novel sitting in an expensive French restaurant with this drivel playing in the background. Horrible bongos and cheesy bass lines mix with hideous guitars like vomit in a cesspool. It sounds disgusting and forced. There’s absolutely no emotion anywhere on the album. Antena herself sounds cold, more like a session singer who doesn’t like what she’s singing but doing it because the money’s good. “Eclat de Nuit” is a slow number that is meant to sound slinky and sexy but Antena ends up dead and asexual. Before the album hits the halfway mark I’m feeling like death would be a sweet release. Killing myself to escape from listening to this album wouldn’t be suicide, it would be euthanasia.
However it keeps going and I keep listening. I find out later in the disc that Antena isn’t happy making bland music of her own, she has to bland up other artists’ music too. Included on this disc is her reworking of Frank Zappa’s “Village of the Sun.” It sounds dreadful. I’m not a fan of Zappa to begin with but no one deserves this sort of treatment. Antena sounds even more bored singing this than she does with her own songs. As if it wasn’t enough of a treat to have all this music reissued, there are bonus live tracks. A number of tracks from On a Warm Summer Night appear again, along with a couple of other songs. From the sounds of things, Antena is even less exciting live as she is in the studio. She sounds flat and dreary on all of the songs. Every time she tries to sound passionate she sounds even more dismal.
Obviously there is a huge jazz influence on her writing but jazz is supposed to be full of fire and passion. Even listening to a great jazz musician playing standards is heaven. However, Antena is jazz purgatory. Her music is jazz reduced to something that is more suited to being background music in a department store than something people should be expected to pay money for. I get a mental image of her band and it’s a bunch of session musicians with big, waxy grins and permed hair in obnoxious shirts. Someone should have drowned them at birth.
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L’Alphabet du Plaisir is a best of collection covering the years 1982 to 2005. It shows that Antena hasn’t always been so cheesy. The first two pieces are sensual, synthesiser-led songs that do a much better job of mixing the Latin rhythms with contemporary pop. “Camino del Sol” in particular being a wonderful little song, the synths and drum machine sound some of Aphex Twin’s calmer output. It is difficult to imagine the same person who inflicted On a Warm Summer Night on us could be so far ahead at one stage.
As the album progresses it is possible to hear Antena’s descent into mediocrity. For the mid- '80s material I can see some merit to them. “Be-Pop” sounds horribly old-fashioned to my young ears but it’s not all bad. “Le Poisson des Mers du Sud” is as much influenced by the Mediterranean as it is by French pop. It wouldn’t be the sort of music I’d normally like but it is one of the more enjoyable parts of the album. However, she then starts pandering to the safer side of the jazz market. Any of the sensuality present in the songs from her early recording career disappears. All that’s left is a collection of hollow tunes, more suited to being played in a lift than on a stereo.
One of the biggest crimes on L’Alphabet du Plaisir is her murder of Serge Gainsbourg (well not literally but I wouldn’t put it past her). Her version of “Ce Mortel Ennui” is appalling, never have I heard such a dreary rendition of Gainsbourg’s work. Worse again, she embraces the songwriting “talent” of Barry Manilow. This is perversion at its most base level and I can be no part of it. Anyone who sinks to covering Barry Manilow needs to banned from entering a recording studio for the rest of their lives, no exceptions.
This is music for people in their middle ages (or possibly in their dark ages) who think they’re cosmopolitan by listening to French pop. They’re the same people I imagine who buy those compilations of contemporary songs being played on pan pipe advertised on TV in the middle of the night. The vast majority of the songs sound contrived and Antena sounds like she would rather be somewhere else. I know I’d rather be somewhere else. In saying that, at least the best of has pointed me to her early work which I intend to investigate further. The rest of her work can gather dust as far as I’m concerned.
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