Melody and Anton were born of Johnny Van Kappers. They bonded over a shared adoration of serene musical frequencies and insouciant airwaves, only unearthed at the funeral of their footballing father, and hide behind killer blankets of fringe. They evidently prefer wafts of chanson to hunks of terrace chanting, yet there's next to naught morbid about this batch of heartwarming numbers from The Narcoleptic Dancers. In fact for the most part, they're equivalently comforting to whisky cocktails in a hot tub amidst blankets of freshly knitted snow.
The sleeve artwork for the debut long-player is quintessentially French kitsch, as the pair sit up in bed, faces typically obscured, a blanched bicycle crumpled on the floor in the foreground. In imagery as postmodernist as much of their songsmithery, it's inconceivable to not be further endeared to the duo. There's intrigue too in the appellation of the album: despite a sprinkling of jaunt throughout, many of the record's ten original tracks (a clutch of demos and bonuses have been tacked onto the tail end, amounting to a somewhat dispensable extended coda of sorts) assume a lullaby-like aspect with hushing metronomic rhythms and quieting xylophones prominent throughout.
The uniformly steady pace is set by Not Evident, as the sounds of pots, pans, finger clicks, and tubular bells are buoyed by an acoustic shuffle that sounds like Reinhardt fidget lodged at a lower rpm than it'd be conventionally accustomed to, before the bewilderingly entitled Rastakraut commences. Coming across a little like any unremarkable member of the Plasticines fronting fellow francophones Jamaica, lyrics of "just doing my girl thing" are overwhelmingly mawkish when propped up by little other than drums wonted of much FM pestering. From then on, Never Sleep drifts off into what sounds like the lost daydreams of Jean-Michel Bernard while busy piecing together the soundtrack to The Science Of Sleep. Coincidentally, it's on the gladdening, stereotypically minimal Sweet And Soft that Melody Van Kappers' croon bears greatest resemblance to Mademoiselle Gainsbourg (or indeed Madame Attal). Then things turn slightly raunchy, with a yowling introduction to the wonky post-punk of Dusty Cowboy: lyrics of "the wettest dream" are transposed atop a relentless beat that'd have Devo jiving in their gaudy boiler suits. Intermittently permeated by mutated American Indian calls last incorporated in anything in any way outstanding by Ennio Morricone, this sliver of the disconcertingly different is too extraordinary, and sounds almost like an envisaging of what may happen to Cat's Eyes were the pent-up sentiments of Faris and Rachel Zeffira to erupt in a moment of impassioned eroticism on the stage of Brixton Academy or some equally decadent setting. Paris' La Flèche d'Or, here, would suffice. Several minutes teeter on the brink of TV ad parody, and the segueing Moon Thrill, while all cutesy and Feist-y, slips down the wrong side of the precarious knife-edge. This, coupled with an air of conscious Coxon-esque underplay, underpins the remainder of the record: the mood swings and key changes of Life Goes On prove ambling, amiable, while Unique Tree cloys particularly; a glimpse perhaps into what it feels like to be an impotent insect enslaved in amber for millennia.
Given the seemingly exceedingly homologous chromosomes contained within the white blood cells that course through their veins, Melody and Anton cannot even aspire to be the latest couple plastered across the side of the N19 in brazen endorsement of a certain fledgling French clothing brand, nor is their blithe acoustica knowingly gritty nor scuffed up enough to merit a release on the 'record label' of the aforementioned marque, yet by God could they quite nonchalantly become your new favourite Franco-Dutch outfit.
