Brigitte Fontaine est - folle

"Within an album or two, Fontaine would be deep in avant-garde jazz and nascent world music hybrids, so in hindsight "Est ... Folle" sounds the most traditional, even though it's nothing of the sort - in fact, the title translates to "Brigitte Fontaine is crazy" and its cover features Fontaine's striking dark eyes emanating from a big white question mark. Recorded in the studio with composer/arranger Jean-Claude Vannier - who would soon add orchestral heft to France's greatest rock export, Serge Gainsbourg's "Histoire de Melody Nelson" - "Est ... Folle" is playful and charming, even if it offers few hints at the curveballs ahead".

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"[One of Fontaine's] most normal and accessible record[s] [though] still not terribly normal by pop standards, its arty songs dressed up with period Continental orchestration and quirky melodies and vocal deliveries. These can both hark back to Edith Piaf-styled material, or look forward to slight avant-garde/experimentalism. At times it sounds like the kind of thing Francoise Hardy might have done had she continued to develop along adventurous lines and keep pace with progressive pop and rock trends in the late '60s".

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"On [previous] albums, arrangements laughed or cried in agreement with Fontaine's disgust and bemusement at the modern world. [Jean-Claude] Vannier's arrangements, by contrast, seemed engaged in an actual dialogue, a genuine collaboration in which a young man begs to differ with the jaded world-view of this (slightly) older woman. "It rains/That's all it can do", sings Fontaine (...), "I cry/That's all I know how to do." Against such comically fatalistic sentiments, Vannier's use of bright glockenspiel, hovering strings, taut rhythms and guitar upstroke offer a compelling counter-argument. Fontaine compares herself to everything from "a drunk animal" ("Blanche Niege") to "a slut Marie Curie" ("Comme Rimbaud") and sings in a weary cigarettes-and-whisky-aged voice about how she "would rather stay in bed" ("Il Se Passe Des Choses"), yet Vannier's arrangements are almost mockingly joyous. Released amid the student protests and general strikes of Paris 1968, this ispost-GainsbourgSituationist pop that tries to strip away the decaying structure of the spectacle. Under the paving stones is the beach, says Vannier's arrangements; under the beach lies hell, answers Fontaine. "Brigitte Fontaine est...?" is the suspended question on the album cover. The answer in the gatefold - "Folle" or "mad" - was but one answer. But it stuck".