Compter les dents

The 11 songs on this superbly performed set are drawn from something many of us have handled in our lives: an old shoebox. Inside the box were tapes of now long-lost singers, singing traditional songs of love and war, life and death. Songs from the Vendée department on France’s western seaboard. Enter three gentlemen from the neighbouring region of Charente-Maritime: Geoffroy Dudouit, Thomas Georget and Guillaume Maupin, who go under the name of tartine de clous (their previous album, Au Cube, was made with Alasdair Roberts and Neil McDermott and released in 2017). In 2019, tartine de clous sat down at a friend’s kitchen table and recorded these shoebox songs captured on tape between the 1970s and noughties, their three voices exchanging weights and centres of gravity, the three-part harmonies augmented by guest players on accordion, violin, piccolo, contrabassoon and cigar-box guitar. The standout on Compter les dents is ‘Y’avait un mois ou cinq semaines’, a melancholy masterpiece with drones and a fine guitar part from Marceau Portron.