Michel Polnareff - Polnareff's (CD)

All Music Guide

The reissue of Michel Polnareff's selftitled psychedelic pop masterpiece from 1971 is both a welcome addition to the CD canon, and probably more than a little offputting to many members of the Elephant 6 collective, as well as to Stereolab and others who have cribbed its originality and vision, and tried to claim it as their own. Others (DJs like the evercranky Gilles Peterson) can be imagined grumbling about how another obscure pillar of their record collections is now available to us plebians who weren't there of course, none of them were, either. Polnareff's is composed and recorded as all of a piece. The lushly layered textures bring in everyone from Serge Gainsbourg and Burt Bacharach, to funky discotheque, along with intimations of the pop of Sandie Shaw and Françoise Hardy, The Turtles, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, and, of course, Scott Walker. Tracks such as "Petite, Petite," "Nos Mots D'Amour," and "Monsieur L'Abbe" reveal that Polnareff would err on packing his tracks with ev...erything he could fit into his grandly baroque, kitschy schema, rather than have left anything to chance. It's overblown and excessive to be sure in a manner, it's like an early model for the excesses of Fleetwood Mac's Tusk but it is also so bloody wellexecuted and produced, it cannot be anything but brilliant. This is pretentious French psychedelic soul at its most garish and essential. - Thom Jurek, All Music Guide Read more Less