Is any topic better suited to being rendered in a non-native language than love? You want to make yourself clear, but you can’t quite get through. Did you really hear what you just thought you heard? You like the sound of that voice, but what it’s saying doesn’t seem to mean what it’s saying.
En Attendant Ana (“waiting for Ana”) is a Parisian quintet, but vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Margaux Bouchaudon sings all 10 of the songs on Juillet (“July”) in English. She’s certainly more skilled with the language than, say, the president of the United States. But misunderstanding remains the topic of many of these tracks, because hey, they’re about young love—and can you really make sense of things when desire takes over? Even when Bouchaudon delivers her lines with absolute confidence, there are still moments when the words might make you scratch your head. Hopefully you can do that and tap your foot at the same time, because there’s no denying the band’s musical fluency.
The melodies that get passed between Bouchaudon’s voice and Camille Fréchou’s trumpet ride cresting waves of trebly electric guitar and crisp, unstoppable rhythms. A name-dropping record collector might suggest that En Attendant Ana sounds a bit like mid-’90s Cannanes fronting late-’80s Stephen (David Kilgour’s combo between episodes of the Clean), but it’s also possible that Bouchaudon and Co. have never heard those bands and they’ve just tapped into the same vein of pop gold.
—Bill Meyer
