1. Amsterdam*
2. Les Timides
3. Le Dernier Repas
4. Les Jardins du Casino
5. Les Vieux
6. Les Toros
7. Tango Funebre
8. Les Plats Pays*
9. Les Bonbons
10. Mathilde
11. Les Bigotes
12. Les Bourgeois
13. Jef
14. Au Suivant*
15. Madeleine
A-
So now we come to an opportunity for me to brush off my high school French. Five and a half years of study and this is literally the only time it's ever been useful, unless you count reading French Wikipedia articles because for some reason French Wikipedia has a lot more biographies for pornographic actresses than the English version. Anyway, I learned two things listening to this album, and they are 1) Brel's lyrics are some next level shit, and honestly give Bob Dylan's a run for their money, and 2) I am not very good at French. In fact I had to pull-up the lyrics for each song on this album and read through them because to be honest I could only understand one word in five. But I think it was worth the effort, and I got the gist of most of the songs even if I didn't quite understand every word.
So anyway, on to the album. I guess I was already familiar with Brel in translation, because people like Scott Walker, David Bowie and Shirley Bassey have all done pretty memorable covers of his work. In particular, Bassey's recording of "If You Go Away" would have to rank as one of the most heart-breaking songs I've ever heard. Then you have Walker's version of "Au Suivant" (which he called "Next"), which is a truly bleak and harrowing piece of music that details the loss of innocence as a group of soldiers are lined up and fed one by one through a mobile bordello on the battlefield. I'm not sure if the song is autobiographical or not but it's heart-breaking and one of my favourite songs, even if it's not as musically memorable as some of the other songs.
And really, the music on this album is pretty great. Fortunately, you don't really need to understand French to enjoy it. Brel has a great voice and the arrangements are interesting and catchy. Brel is as much an actor as he is a singer, and he perfectly conveys the emotion and drama of each of these songs. Which is pretty important, because this is not your typical grab-bag of sappy love songs. "Amsterdam" is a nigh-apocalyptic look at sailors on shore leave in the titular city. "Les Vieux" is a meditation on old age, and the rich and poor alike brought low as they wait for their inevitable deaths (something that hit pretty hard as I recently saw my ailing grandparents for the first time in years). "Les Toros" is about a bullfight, and seems to be a metaphor for something but I'm not sure what (I think it's contrasting the thrill of the spectators, picadors and so forth with the pitiful position of the bull, who dreams as he falls of a special hell for all those bastards). "Les Plats Pays" is about Brel's native Belgium, and the special kind of love that you can have for your homeland even when it's kind of a shithole (something I can identify with as I live in Geelong, which I think is quite nice but which a lot of people have a low opinion of and which to be fair does have a lot of meth heads and bike thieves). There are love songs, but they're mostly bitter or ironic like "Mathilde", which is about a man's former lover returning and the narrator cursing her even as he realises he's doomed to be with her again. But then you have goofy songs like "Les Jardins du Casino" and "Les Bonbons", which significantly lighten the mood.
Anyway I'm not going to go through every song on the album because that would be stupid. This is a pretty great album, though. The music is great, and the lyrics are the icing on the cake if you happen to be able to understand them (which, if any francophones read this, I would like to reiterate that I barely did). Even as a blind man groping through the darkness of these songs I couldn't help but appreciate Brel's genius, and see why he's so highly regarded both in the French-speaking world and abroad.
Incidentally I think this is the only French-language album we have on the list until Serge Gainsbourg pops-up with Melody Nelson - an album that can only be described as "deeply problematic", although it does have beautiful arrangements.
Tune in next time for an album with one great song on it and a bunch of boring bullshit filler! Au revoir!
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