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Wednesday, 09 November 2011

Jil Is Lucky - Paris, France

Written by  Phil Heron
Jil is Lucky Jil is Lucky Jil is Lucky

I had somehow come into contact with Roy Music, the label of the Paris band Jil Is Lucky, through booking gigs around Europe. The label manager put on a few gig nights in the City of Lights, and often prescribed peculiar English names (with a feline slant) to attract a fashionable crowd (e.g. Cute as a Cat and We Are The Lions). A while after a brief email exchange with the mysteriously omnipresent club promoter and label manager, I received a blank postcard to my home address with an image of a man in a pair of sunglasses flanked by four religious leaders dressed in colourful spandex (which would be album cover shown here, but without the band title). A few weeks later, the debut album of Jil Is Lucky appeared in my postbox.

This charming record is a heady-mix of styles, religions, instruments and peculiar prose. Jil Bensénior, leader of Jil Is Lucky, sings entirely in English throughout the self-titled debut, sparking interest in whether the strange lyrics are mistranslations or in perfect keeping with the troubadour nature of the album. Either way, I couldn’t help but be endeared to Jil Is Lucky. The 12 tracks are jam-packed with many musical styles and sociological issues (tackling chanson, ska-punk, folk, and post-rock as well as tipping the hat to Christianity, Judaism and Islam in three separate songs), culminating in a grand listening experience. Roy Music have made the 10-minute final track, Hovering Machine, available for free download.

Jil Is Lucky garnered great success in France when this album was released in 2009, buoyed by a silly video for their single The Wanderer. A new album is in the works, which, if I'm lucky, will mean a mysterious blank postcard full of priests and rabbis to pique my interest before the next dose of Jil's melodical madness.

 

 

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