Album Review: Chansons d'Ennui Tip-Top by Jarvis Cocker

Well, this is all a bit of fun, isn’t it? Jarvis Cocker‘s playful, silly new album Chansons d’Ennui Tip-Top has come about because playful, silly movie director Wes Anderson asked Jarv to “record a new version of Aline for his new film The French Dispatch“. What we’ve ended up with (happily) is an entire album of “French material from the same period, songs originally made notable by the likes of Françoise Hardy, Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Dutronc and others”. How this hasn’t happened before now is something only a MENSA bod would be able to work out, because not only do Anderson and Jarv seem like an ideal pairing, but there’s something to be said for Jarv’s Gainsbourg-influenced reptile lounge mode that he just does so bloody well, and there should have been a full album of it by now.

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When I first heard that Jarvis Cocker was releasing an album of chanson covers my ear picked up. Having been a fan of the chanson tradition for years - lyric-driven songs, typically in French - and knowing that Cocker has lived in Paris, off and on, since 2003 this felt like a good fit. Then factor that 'Aline' features in Wes Anderson's new film The French Dispatch, and that Cocker and Anderson picked the songs together, it felt like an ideal match.

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