LES MANGE-TOUT - Les Mange-Tout

A cheeky cover in a riot of colours, and almost as many instruments played across the record, introduces the Italian-French duo Les Mange-Tout, making their full-length debut after an underground mini-album released some time ago on the late My Honey Records.

Between Genoa and Le Havre, the two young women behind Les Mange-Tout – Germana Bargoni and Nathalie Barxs – have found common ground for their multi-instrumental skills in both players' evident fondness for melodic miniatures and a shared playful spirit, eternally adolescent, in the way they approach music.

This is an enchanted world, sketched out over the course of this nimble album, produced under the supervision of Alessandro Paderno of Le Man Avec Les Lunettes; it is a world observed with a curious, lively gaze and an extreme attention to small things, which indeed recur in the song titles and lyrics, as well as in the instrumental vignettes, where bass and acoustic guitars sit alongside xylophone, ukulele, accordion, organs and an assortment of toy harmoniums.

It is almost inevitable to think of Yann Tiersen's Amélie while listening to the brisk succession of twelve short sketches (only two tracks exceed three minutes) packed into this spring record, fizzy and steeped in the briny flavour of the two protagonists' port cities, with a French touch in the settings and in its alternation between refined brightness and a subtle, Parisian-drizzle melancholy.

In a sense this is bedroom music, but disenchanted and far from easy rhetoric, which, through the genuine pop taste of the songs and the lively interweaving of Germana's and Nathalie's angelic yet impertinent voices, draws attention to the domestic instinctiveness of simple, eccentric instrumental textures, capable of entertaining with marches, nursery rhymes and music boxes, but also of capturing snapshots of subtle melancholy, on guitar notes or little more.

“Les Mange-Tout” unfolds without pause in brilliant nods to seventies pop, delicate homespun acoustic folk and peculiar reworkings of timeless ballads, where forays of xylophone, reed organs and toy keyboards frequently burst in, revealing the commendable ability of the two girls to make music seriously without taking themselves too seriously.

Their spirit is indeed jovial and playful, but the care in the songwriting is remarkable, and so are the references – more or less conscious – to a wide range of influences, from Scandinavian indie-pop to Belle & Sebastian, from vintage French pop to the vocal interplay of Kings Of Convenience or Stereolab, which Germana and Nathalie seem to have made their own, alternately delivering them over acoustic bases or simple interplays of organ and accordion.

But above all, “Les Mange-Tout” deserves credit for being a thoroughly enjoyable and playful record – from the brisk pace of “Cute Cake” to the ironic cha cha cha that closes “Les Petits Pieds Froids” – passing through a kaleidoscope of liquid sounds, acoustic watercolours and assorted pop sweetness, crafted with style and with a naturalness that deserves to be cherished. Because, thankfully, for some people making music is still fun.

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04/06/2010