1. Amsterdam
2. Les Timides
3. Le Dernier Repas
4. Les Jardins de Casino
5. Les Vieux
6. Les Toros
7. Tango Funèbre
8. Le Plat Pays
9. Les Bonbons
10. Mathilde
11. Les Bigotes
12. Les Bourgeois
13. Jef
14. Au Suivant
15. Madeleine
Thrill! as I frantically search online for translated lyrics as an enraged Belgian bellows at me. Such is my life, now that I have started this blog.
I seem to be unable to escape live albums lately. After the wild and raucous crowds of Sam Cooke and James Brown, it's a bit of a strange transition to suddenly have to deal with a crowd of relatively polite Europeans. Fortunately, Jacques makes up for their calmness by displaying a wide range of emotions via the magic of song. They're all showtunes or cabaret songs or whatever you want to call them, and that type of material just doesn't work if you're not going to belt them out. And that's exactly what he does here, taking the roles of each character in the songs. It's certainly an impressive range.
The lyrics are naturally wonderful, at least when I can understand them. The translated lyrics certainly look good. It's a nice change from the youth-oriented pop songs that still dominated rock music in this era. These songs were clearly written by an adult, with beautiful lyrics covering everything from getting old to lots and lots of whores and everything in between.
I haven't said all that much about the music, because this album treats it as a way to move the lyrics along. I enjoyed this album, but mainly it made me want to improve my French to the exalted level of "Not Shit". 8/10
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