Sabina - Toujours (2014)

The singer of avant-garde electro-punk outfit Brazilian Girls, Sabina Sciubba is a multi-lingual artist whose music transcends both space and time. Across no less than five different languages, her straight talking debut solo album Toujours is a compelling, intimate, narcotic dreamscape you might call The Parisienne Velvet Underground and Nico, with a surprising sense of humour. Toujours was written on guitars in Paris and produced by Brazilian Girls' producer Frederick Rubens. It is New York, new-wave carousing with Serge Gainsbourg, an art-punk, multi-lingual, Marlene Dietrich hypnotising the hobos in a Weimar Republic dive-bar. A lingering side-ways glance at contemporary life, opening track 'Cinema' laments cultural decline, likening the fall of movies to "an old whore who has lost her charms". On the track 'Toujours', meanwhile, she decides "we might as well be happy", the song's DIY, semi-animated video a homage to Pythonesque surrealism, with Sabina on a donkey, playing a ukulele, a star around her head, wearing nothing but a goofy smile. This is not what we expect from a femme fatale and is in part a rejection of today's sexually aggressive, physically "perfect" pop sirens.