Admittedly, some of them start of shaky territory, ringing twee alarm bells with some gentle acoustic strums (sounds like they’ve got a banjo or something on the go?), tambourine and the like, but, as with most vintage French pop songs, as soon as the rhythm section hits you’re sold. Sultry (sorry, just no other word for it) vocals sink in just right alongside heavy, period-appropriate organ tones, and most of these cuts also make room for at least a bit of wild, tremoloed, Davie Allen-esque fuzz guitar (still the best go-to signifier of menace and danger in music, over fifty years since Link Wray first got his Rumble on).

Writing about these tunes, it’s hard to resist the urge to drift into gallic cliché, but something tells me that this is a brand of cliché that the band wouldn’t necessarily want to distance themselves from. ‘Longanisee’ and ‘Crystal Anis’ for instance are pure Gainsbourg tributes, spoken word languor over creeping Melodie Nelson bass lines (the former even throws in a “woo woo” hook that recalls that kinda monkey shriek in ‘Bonnie & Clyde’), whilst ‘Belmondo’ cranks out a tightly-wound crime movie instrumental that can’t help but raise visions of the song’s namesake pulling handbrake turns in his 2CV on cramped Parisian streets. (As is often the case, most of my favourites from the album aren’t currently available on youtube, bandcamp or soundcloud, but we’ll do what we can with what’s there.)

All of the band’s best traits come together towards the end of the album on the supremely titled ‘La Ballade de Clive’, a perfect distillation of everything that rules about their sound, echoing, broken amp fuzz cuddling backing up a sparse xylophone riff that builds to a truly sublime central melody line (that it keeps reminging me of ‘Federal Dust' by The Silver Jews is more a failing of my myopic US indie education than of the song itself).