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Album review
Rita Mitsouko
Eternally Cool and Frenetic
Paris
03/03/2000 -
After fifteen years in the music business bands face several risks - losing their touch, selling out to their record companies, or worse still, selling out on their fans, worrying about how to make their next big come-back or turning into a pale caricature of their former selves. Luckily, some groups manage to survive a decade and a half in the music business and still keep their music fresh and up-to-date without compromising their original ideas. Meet Catherine Ringer and Fred Chichin, better known to French music fans as Les Rita Mitsouko!
The alternative pop duo are currently back in the French music news after a remarkably long absence. In fact, the duo's last studio album Système D dates back to 1993. True, Les Rita did re-emerge momentarily in 1996 with Acoustiques, a sort of live Greatest Hits album which resulted from an appearance on a French TV show. This rehash of Les Rita's classics together with their increasingly rare live appearances led many critics to wonder whether the duo's creative juices had finally dried up. Compared to Les Rita's early days when albums were released in quick succession - Rita Mitsouko (1984), The No Comprendo (1986) and Marc et Robert (1988) - major gaps began to appear in their discography, fans having to wait five years before the appearance of Système D and another seven before Cool Frénésie.
Les Rita have always had a difficult relationship with the French charts. The duo's albums have tended to explode onto the music scene, causing a brief but intense burst of excitement, then faded from view before going on to prove themselves as best-sellers in the long term (several of Les Rita Mitsouko's albums have actually gone platinum in the end). And Cool Frénésie may well have to undergo the same slow, steady rise to fame as Marc et Robert or Les Rita's last album Système D.
Perhaps, when it comes down to it, Les Rita's original pop sound just takes a while to catch on - after all, the duo have frequently ignored popular music trends, shooting off on their own experimental tangents and their clashing melodies and disjointed rhythms are not always readily accessible. Having said that, however, we confidently predict that songs like Allo and Cool Frénésie will follow in the footsteps of Le Petit Train(a Rita Mitsouko hit which took several long months to make its mark on French radio stations and the general public).
As the title Cool Frénésie suggests, there are plenty of contradictions at the heart of Les Rita's new album - the pace is at once cool and frenetic, the tone sweet and sour and the beat can veer from dance-floor hedonism to moody introspection at a moment's notice. Needless to say, electronica plays a major role on Les Rita's new album, but Ringer and Chichin prove they have their own particular take on the French Touch. In fact, programmations can wander off into moody atmospheric moments even when the duo are in full dance-floor mode (c.f. Un zéro, the mean and menacing Les Guerriers, tipped-for-the-top hit Allo and Cool Frénésie, the first single release from the album). In other words Les Rita's "cool and frenetic" bursts of electro avoid the commercial paraphrasing of mainstream stars such as Pascal Obispo and Florent Pagny without descending into the obscure depths of trip hop. Les Rita seem to have a rather ambivalent relationship with electronica - Allo, the sixth track on their new album, for example, is simply a dancefloor re-working (complete with rapid breakbeats and special-effect vocals) of the duo's well-known guitar classic Alors c'est quoi.
As far as the lyrics on the new album are concerned, Les Rita's famous humour and lightness of touch are fused with some very intelligent insights into modern-day social phenomena. Pense à ta carrière sends up career obsessives while Grip-shit Rider in Paris brings us a hilarious spoof written in witty "tourist guide" style. Meanwhile, songs like Femme de moyen âge show that the controversial duo have lost none of their social concerns. Much of Les Rita's success live success has been down to the flamboyant stage performances of frontwoman Catherine Ringer and on this new album Ms. Ringer shows she is as upfront and feisty as ever - what's more, her spectacularly shrill vocals are still firmly intact!
The former actress brings her best thespian skills to the fore on the vaudeville love triangle Toi & Moi & Elle, the Romantic adventures of La Sorcière et l'Inquisiteur and the chic little duet Dis-moi des mots (recorded with Jean Néplin, Fred Chichin's old partner-in-crime from 80s punk group Fassbinder). But Ms. Ringer saves her most impressive performance for C'était un homme, a moving song about the life of her father Samuel Ringer. (Monsieur Ringer, a Polish Jew, was deported during the war, survived the hell of the concentration camps and returned to France to launch a successful career as a painter).
To sum up then, Cool Frénésie is an intelligent, energetic, tragi-comic and utterly brilliant new album which is guaranteed to make a major impact on French airwaves and dancefloors over the coming months. In fact, we predict that when someone puts together the inevitable Sound of 2000 compilation, at least one Rita Mitsouko song will feature prominently on it!
French text: Bertrand Dicale
English version: Julie Street
Bertrand Dicale
13/09/2002 -
