DØ - Both Ways Open Jaws

A French duo of inventive musicians (they met while composing the soundtrack for “Empire Of The Wolves”), Olivia Boyssou Merihlati and Dan Levy return amid well-earned anticipation, not just from their compatriots but from alternative audiences everywhere. Their debut, “A Mouthful“, a playful pop blend, was the first album by an English-singing French band to reach number one on the national charts, a feat even Phoenix hadn’t managed before 2008 (cue the envy).

"Both Ways Open Jaws" confirms and surpasses the ambitions of that earlier record, in a whirlwind of musical sensations hard to find anywhere else.

In Merihlati's post-bjorkism lies the ability to paint, with great variety, a pop fable whose colours are always subtly unsettling, in the manner of St. Vincent ("The Wicked And The Blind"). The melodic openings of "Both Ways Open Jaws", despite the arty guise guaranteed by the stripped-down line-up and the almost always spare arrangements (in a scheme sometimes à la Wildbirds And Peacedrums, as in the tribal hip hop of "Slippery Slope"), nonetheless suggest an expression unmediated by posturing.

Without going so far as the more reassuring straightforwardness of "Too Insistent" (complete with a cinematic ending of strings and horns, yet without heaviness), what remains front and centre on this record is always a brilliant pop incisiveness that hasn't lost the childlike freshness of the debut ("The Calendar"), half skipping about in an imaginary street playground, the other half reduced to a sticky nursery rhyme ("Bohemian Dances").

A record for the (never) dormant inner child, still half-asleep in the tent pitched in the living room, the light on and imagination for company ("Was It A Dream"). None of this can conceal the refinement of the composition and arrangement, expressed in the orchestral delicacy of "Leo Leo", to name one, skilfully "hidden" within the record's light-touch fabric.

Credit, then, to the French duo for having created something that turns artistic freedom tout court into freedom as a state of soul and mind, managing to pluck the fleeting, shimmering substance of the moon and the mermaids.

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28/03/2011