Camille - ilo veyou

Poked

I have come across Camille's performance on Later.....with Jools Holland a little - haha - late having recorded and then watched last night, so I have only just seen her lying on her back on a rug singing Wet Boy and then barefoot on a blanket doing her Piaf best with La France, quirky but one helluva lot of fun, and my goodness, as we know, she has some great French pipes.

Opener Aujourd'hui is, as far as I can make out, a piece of performance poetry, the plosive sounds made all the more enticing because I don't know what she is saying - it is pure sound. Wonderful. Third track Alez Alez Alez sounds like it should be a Hare Krishna chant, even with the chamber strings at the start, but the choric childrens' vocal  is again simply bucketloads of musical fun. Wet Boy sounds like the ghost of Jeff Buckley duetting with Feist and I invoke these two as a compliment to the range portrayed within the first four songs [and sixth Mars Is No Fun echoes the vocal of Rickie Lee Jones]. Then you come to seventh track Le Berger which is simply sublime as a vocal, and wholly Camille in another beautiful place within that expansive range. Eighth Bubble Lady plays around again with the plosive sounds of the alliterative 'b' as well as other accompanying percussive voices - no instruments in the whole song - and it's essentially silly, clever and joyful. Title track Ilo Veyou continues the vocal romp and merges into the nursery song of Message. And then we have the wonderful rollings of La France that Camille claims is more old aunt than Piaf. Whatever, just enjoy it rather than get too serious. Camille clearly isn't. This is definitely mood music and you need to be in a good mood to let its playfulness poke without annoying. Indeed, she's obviously a performer in her element when singing live and I think that could playfully prod me to good humour even if I was in a bad mood.