Hooray for Biolay

The man you see before you, this musical child of Gainsbourg who, unlike his father, hurts neither eyes nor ears as he delivers gently beautiful melodies and soft but sharp lyrics backed by lovely arrangements, has struck deep into my brain.

I have a feeling this song, "Los Angeles", is ubiquitous because I've heard it more times than I can count. Nobody else around me seems to have heard it, though. I've realized that since the concept album it's from, Rose Kennedy, came out while I was living in Paris it's possible that it was only ubiquitous there as background to that most emotionally sloppy and difficult period, and it stuck with me because that repeated trumpet rise perfectly delineates the resigned melancholy with which I wandered through a bad dream life.

This would mean people in Canada might not know about Benjamin Biolay (as is evidenced by his stuff's non-availability on Amazon.ca - I had both Rose Kennedy and Négatif on order for assfucking months before I gave up and borrowed them from Mr. N, and his lady was complaining last week about how he'd made her go into every record shop in Montréal trying to find more) and that's just wrong, wrong, do you read me, wrong. This is a bilingual country. If we have to put up with French/English cereal boxes, we might as well listen to lovely French music too.

Anyways, treat yourself. It's really nice. I don't like him as much as I like Serge Gainsbourg because I like the perv and the bizarre (I mean, a concept album about Rose Kennedy isn't a bad idea, but a concept album about killing your lover and her coming back as a rabbit that eats your head which has turned into a cabbage - which would you rather listen to?) but he sure is prettier. Some trivia for you: his wife Chiara is the daughter of Catherine Deneuve and and Marcello Mastroianni. HAWT.