Louis Philippe - Jean Renoir

All Music Guide

For their second collaboration, Louis Philippe and Dean Brodrick relaxed the selfimposed onlyvocalsandpiano rules that governed the first, Rainfall, to the extent of admitting drums and guitars. Nevertheless, it's the lush vistas of multitracked voices that dominate an album that's frequently cinematic in terms of both scope and subject matter. As well as the album's title, there's a song called ‘An American Friend' (actually inspired by John Ford's The Searchers), a version of the Ogden Nash/Kurt Weill song ‘Speak Low' (here rendered as ‘Tous Bas') from the musical ‘One Touch of Venus', and ‘Vicky Page', a love song for the ballet dancing heroine of The Red Shoes. The infectious ‘Nowhere Square', too, sounds as though it was written for a screwball musical comedy. Any listeners who got as far as sampling the album in a shop, however, might never have reached these delights, deterred as they may have been by the bizarre, guttural chants of ‘Une Ile', a frankly disastrous choice of open...ing track. Yet fears that the pair's avowed experimentalism might have led into murky waters are immediately dispelled by ‘Lazy English Sun', a slice of effortless sunshine pop that resurfaced, appropriately enough, on the Sunshine album. It's nevertheless Jean Renoir's darker songs that give the album its unque character, notably the three that feature telling vocal contributions from Microdisney's Cathal Coughlan ‘Hunters', ‘True Men' and ‘An American Friend'. The latter in particular, an unsettling sixminute epic built around a swirling miasma of sampled voices, is one of Philippe's most remarkable creations, and light years removed from the candy pop for which he is still best known. The wistful ‘Vicky Page' with its spectral setting of synths and drum machine is another triumph of imagination over budget. For all the album's many pleasures, however, there remains a suspicion that overall Jean Renoir lacks the final degree of melodic finesse that characterises Philippe's very best work. Perhaps its principal value, along withRainfall, lies in the freedom both projects afforded Philippe to develop his skills as both composer and arranger in ways that would inform his later, less exploratory, work. - Christopher Evans, All Music Guide Read more Less