To start the new year here is my list of the ten best French language albums of 2009.

Broadly speaking we have one hip hop, two rock, three ska, one reggae and three humorous, which are predominantly rock-based.

There were several albums that I was expecting to put on this list but discovered were in fact late 2008 releases. It all goes by far too quickly for me.

In the next post I’ll highlight some of the releases that we can look forward to over the next year. While 2009 has been a great year for ska, there is promise from bands such as Vulgaires Machins that we’ll have some top quality rock to get our ears around in 2010.

Like all their albums, this release contains some of the worst singing you are ever likely to hear outside of the X Factor but sometimes the inanity of a record such as Dans Mon Corps is exactly what the moment calls for.

Dan Mon Corps came out in October and sees the band from Quebec in just as ridiculous and joyful form as ever. The track Croquer des cous is one of my favourites but gives the game away that these guys, despite their attempts to pretend otherwise, are in fact pretty talented punk/rock songwriters and musicians.

I would have liked to have included Diam’s S.O.S. here but her incessant talking, worse, her incessant whispering between tracks drives me bonkers.

I also considered Diam’s close friend Sinik’s album Ballon D’or in its place. I had wanted to translate the song 4-4-2 from Ballon D’or shortly after the world cup draw a few days after the release of the album at the end of November.

L’ecrasement De Tête is more intersting and enjoyable than either Diam’s or Sinik’s latest releases which I why I have chosen it here.

Their music is also fairly humorous and lighthearted but less shameless than either that of Les Singes Savants or their Canadian counterparts, Les Trois Accords, despite having represented France in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2007.

There are clearly strong influences from bands such as The Libertines and Arctic Monkeys (Black and Blue is almost obscenely Monkeyesque) and when you start listening to the key riff in Bouche B you will be forgiven for thinking you are listening to Queens of the Stone Age. At one point there is even a blatant, though probably unintentional, Pulp riff.

Although there are 15 tracks, over half of them are under three minutes and none of them are over four minutes. I listened to this album for the first time on my iPod while on the treadmill and it did a fine job of keeping me running. It’s rare that I outrun an album and have to “rewind”, but that’s what happened.

La Belle Étoile was their first release for five years and was a quite a different offering from the previous albums. This album would make my top ten albums of the decade. In any language.

Their latest release, A Tout Moment, released in October this year is contained within the Amazon widget to the left. I’ve just bought this album today and as I write this have not yet listened to it – this is today’s motivation to get to the gym. A treadmill full of Eiffel awaits me once I’ve published this post. Or should that be “an Eiffel of treadmill?”.

UPDATE: I’ve had my first listen to the album and there are a two or three tracks that sound great – in particular there is some blinding drumming and some truly dramatic sections of the film soundtrack kind. The clean guitar on Mort J’Appelle put me in mind of the acoustic sections that intersperse W.A.S.P.’s The Crimson Idol, an album which is one of my guilty pleasures and is currently coming nostalgically through my computer’s speakers. God, I’d forgotten how much I loved that damn album. When it finishes I am going to listen to Eiffel’s offering again and see if I can’t write a readable review.

The song I am going to translate here is A Tout Moment La Rue which you can listen to in its entirety online on their website where you can also find the lyrics.

We find another left-wing reference à la this song. Thanks to the community at the Word Reference Forums I now know that the “trois cent familles” is a reference to the concept that a small number of privileged and wealthy families are running the country.

We have a problem in the translation. Avoir pignon sur rue means to be well-established. In the lyric “ces trois cent familles qui sur la rue ont pignon à tout moment elle peut aussi dire non” the “elle” refers to “la rue” so we have to keep the word street in the translation of the expression. Which frankly isn’t possible so the translation is rather a hack. Ideas welcome.

Marions-Nous Au Soleil (Let’s Get Married In The Sun), features Karina Zeviani and is the second track on La Belle Étoile which was the subject of the yesterday’s post.

A few pieces of interesting vocabulary to look at. I struggled to translate “ma caille” which means literally “my quail”. This is an affectionate term for a girlfriend and I searched my brainbox for English birdy equivalents but failed to find anything.

Unfortunately there is currently a problem with the Amazon widget creator which means that I have only been able to include seven tracks from the album on the widget to the left. Luckily they are seven of the best. You can hear samples from all tracks here.

Unless something spectacular happens over the next four weeks, I can confidently state that La Belle Étoile is the finest French language album of 2009. I absolutely adore it.

I was privileged to be able to catch two performances by Babylon Circus while they were on the UK leg of their current European tour and given half a chance I fully intend to travel over to France and see them again in the new year.

They are one of the best live bands I’ve ever seen and I for one hope they gain the massive recognition they deserve.

La Belle Étoile, released in March 2009, is something of a musical departure for the band whose last album was release five years ago. Previous studio releases have been packed with hard ska and reggae beats and more than a dash of the revendicatif. This album is slightly more melodic and slightly more subtle and devastating with its attack on your whatever part of your brain is responsible for trapping catchy songs in the internal humbox.

Every base is covered from the thumping, concert-opening Perdu, the thumping, crowd-pleasing La Cigarette, to the understated Des Fois and Le Fils Caché Du Pape to the gorgeous voice of Karina Zeviani on Marions-nous au soleil and the embarrassingly-catchy Nina.

What can I say? I love it. I urge you to use the Amazon widget to the left to listen to extracts.

Tomorrow I will publish a translation of one of the tracks – haven’t decided which yet.

I have only one other Diam’s album, the 2006 Dans ma bulle and essentially S.O.S. is pretty much more of the same, that’s to say, very solid hip hop with the occasional track that stands out.

In fairness, I think there are a few more stand out songs on this album than on Dans ma Bulle and I think Coeur De Bombe is one of those tracks.

Interestingly it is the only track that I put in my “favourite french songs” playlist while I was listening to the album for the first time although I certainly don’t think it is the strongest track on the album.

In any case, it’s the song I am going to translate in this post!

As I do in these circumstances, I went in search of the samples that accompany MP3 downloads these days and found the album Nos Lendemains (Our tomorrows) in the UK iTunes store.

I was not suprised to find that her previous album De retour à la source was nominated for the Canadian Juno Award for francophone album of the year in 2008 which was eventually won by Daniel Bélanger who was one of the earliest singers I translated on this site.

Yesterday, BB Brunes released their second album Nico Teen Love. Their first single from this album was released several months ago and was available to listen to free online. You can see videos of Dynamite (translated here) and others in the video section of their site. Extracts from three other songs from Nico Teen Love have been available for some time here.

It had been possible to pre-order the album in physical form and, unfortunately, for a physical price but, not wanting another CD in my life I decided to wait until the release date and download from either iTunes or Amazon depending on which was the cheapest (not that I’ve ever found an album that was cheaper on iTunes).

If you want to hear extracts from all the songs on the album you can hear them on the French Amazon store although you will not be able to buy the album outside of France. Alternatively, you can fire up iTunes, navigate to the store and then in the bottom right of your iTunes application select the round flag icon and then use the following list of countries to move to the French store. You can then search for the album and listen to the extracts, but again, unless you have a French iTunes account you won’t be able to get your ears on the full album. The iTunes price of 14.99 euros is horrific and is made worse when you see that it is priced at a much more sensible 9.99 EUR on Amazon.

Amazon have however got their hands on some of my money today after I bought Diam’s new release S.O.S. Voilà pourqoui the album in the widget is not the subject of this post. Unusually this was the same price (GBP 7.99) as in iTunes but I prefer to buy from Amazon so that I get the DRM-free MP3s and Amazon’s downloader integrates the album into your iTunes library for you without any hassle.

So, there will be two reviews coming shortly.

I took the picture to the left at a Babylon Circus gig this Halloween just gone.

I’d seen them in London a few days previously and absolutely had to see them again before they left the UK to continue their tour in France where they were, incidentally, supported by another great French band, Les Gars Dans L’Coin.

Back then I was watching two or three gigs a week and back then I myself was touring the pubs and clubs of Southampton (UK) in a four piece cover band.

Having played guitar since I was old enough to say “can I play on your guitar dad?”, I found myself in the backseat position of drummer. There are two reasons for this. Firstly because I was offered the role by a band that already had their claws in the circuit and secondly, because if I had been allowed anywhere near the front of the stage I would have bored the audience to tears. Noone could ever have accused me back in the day of being a “people person.”

That’s not to say of course that the guy or girl behind the drumkit can’t be an entertainer – far from it, indeed in a live performance a talented drummer can take on the task of conducting the audience as well as the band. But that drummer wasn’t me.

Chris (me), Jason, Keith and Andy before a gig circa 1990

You can probably tell this from this photograph from when I was sixteen. I’m the miserable one on the left. That is the look of a guy who never got over not being the guitarist. Notice how even the lights around me are unimpressed.

So with this in mind I’ve been compiling the top ten things that make for a great live performance and I’ll be sharing them with you over the next couple of articles.

The song he is attacking is the song I’m going to translate today.

Marie Mai first gained fame as one of the finalists of Star Académie, a Québécois version of those shows such as X-Factor, Pop Idol, etc… that we have all come to know and [hate/love/ignore]. A talented singer who would be unlikely to make the cut on an English version as we seem to prefer to pick people that we can use for headline-fodder rather than finding real singers.

Her style is very much in the same arena as that of Avril Lavigne and although I’m not sure if I should admit it, I have to say that I do kind of enjoy this sort of rocky pop when it’s done well. Albeit in small doses.

The 2007 album Dangereuse Attraction opened with a very strong track called Mentir. As you may already know I keep a play list of songs to help me make it through my gym sessions and Mentir is a song that has been in that list for a while.

Version 3.0 does not start as well as Dangereuse Attraction, although the first two tracks are still pretty good. However track three C’est Moi descends into a realm of pop music with which I’m not really very comfortable – Cher-style voice screwery and other electro-effects – nothing horrific but enough to turn me off. Track four Garde Tes Larmes “Keep your tears” starts off in much the same vein although quickly improves with a chorus that is amongst the best on the album.

Next up is what I consider to be the strongest song on the album Secrets. It then all cruises along until Plaisirs Amers where we once again have to listen to voice-fiddling but this is balanced out with hints of some heavier guitar riffs which come excitingly close to leaning towards the metal that I often go into dark corners to listen to.

Rebâtir Notre Histoire is probably the weakest song. It starts pretty badly then tries to improve but then gives up.

The album finishes with the English language song Do You – half rock, half dance – decent enough but essentially just more of the same. This is, for me, the biggest problem with the album. Although perfectly solid with a very fine singer and some decent tracks, everything’s a little samey whereas I felt that Dangereuse Attraction had far more variety and interest.

It stayed the same for a very long time as there was a bug in the Amazon system that meant that I had to start from scratch each time I wanted to change one of the songs. Happily, that bug was recently fixed and I was able to update the widget. Unfortunately not all my favourite groups are available but thankfully a great many are.

It is often the case when I find great new groups they are not available in the Amazon or iTunes UK stores, sometimes not even having made it as far as the French iTunes and Amazon stores, which means I can’t widgetise them here. Le Vilain Volatile is a good example.

So, to mark the long overdue update of the little fella over on the right I thought I would put up a poll for you to rate each track out of ten to see if we can find The Best Song in the Widget.

Unfortunately only UK users will see all fifteen songs in the Widget. French users will only see fourteen and everyone else will see just ten. This is due to the availability of the songs in the various international Amazon stores.