Mauvaises Nouvelles Des Étoiles

The arch French sleaze-merchant Gainsbourg was an imp of the perverse his whole life long. He’d already made a reggae album, featuring Sly & Robbie among many other top ranking Jamaican musicians in his 13th LP Aux Armes et Cætera in 1979 — but on its 1981 follow-up he got weird. Recorded at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas and featuring Sly & Robbie, Uziah "Sticky" Thompson and Mikey Chung all of The Revolutionaries, but also part of the Compass Point All Stars, it’s utterly deluxe in its textures, full of strange small hallucinatory sonic details, and Gainsbourg’s pseudo-rapped spoken vocals are close mic’ed and creep into your head as angelic backing harmonies float by as if this is just normal pop music. It’s not normal, though, not by a long shot, and as if to prove it, Gainsbourg adds three minutes of farting noises to a backing track on “Evgueni Sokolov.” Don’t let that put you off though, that horrible interruption aside this is a truly unique and wonderful piece of work.