Ilo Veyou

Le Fil was a quirky yet sophisticated collection of finely wrought songs. Its follow-up, Music Hole, tended to push the quirkiness (animal noises and body-slapping percussion) to the fore, leaving one admiring rather than fully enjoying the end result. So is this precocious, wilfully perverse French talent’s new album back on track? To a degree. With its subtle and idiosyncratic use of a string quartet, it’s less cluttered and more agreeable on the ear. You can also sense how the ambience of the French 12th century abbey it was recorded in impacted on Camille’s mood and – with one or two exceptions – curbed her leanings towards self-indulgence.

So lets deal with those exceptions first. The disposable Edith Piaf parody ‘La France’ is just Camille saying "Yes, I can do this too" And ‘Mars Is No Fun’ is this album’s ‘Cats and Dogs’, but instead of animal noises we get the equally irritating (after a few plays) pitch-shifted cartoon backing vocals. The problem with Camille seems to be her own apparent lack of interest in taking herself wholly seriously, as if the mask – tragic or comic – always has to stay in place. For this woman is not only one of contemporary music’s most original songwriters, she’s also one of its most interesting sonic architects. So even if Ilo Veyou is mostly engaging and occasionally sublime, if she dropped the showy novelty songs (even if they do work fine in a live context) and made a darker straight-from-the-heart album it would probably be a masterpiece.