The Singles Jukebox

Une barbe très large.

[Video][Website]
[5.70]

Anthony Easton: Vangelis’ epic symphonics and Serge Gainsbourg’s toad croak vocals compete with church bells and angel choirs–if heaven was a night club, and the angels were strippers, this might be the soundtrack.
[8]

Iain Mew: WOW. I can only think of one other thing we’ve covered which compares to this in operatic scale: Ayumi Hamasaki’s “Brillante”. Like “Brillante”, this is as gorgeous as it is colossal and ineffable, and has some amazing choral vocals. Unlike “Brillante”, it, er, ends after what feels like only half of a song. What a half though!
[8]

Pete Baran: Time-wise, it’s just possible that Jean Michel Jarre and Enigma had a love child in the mid-nineties who would just be maturing now. This is the sound of said girl’s coming-out party, with her proud godfather, Sebastien Tellier, perving all over her. This couldn’t get more French if you stuffed a baguette in its pants and smeared Camembert all over its face.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: Haha, I bet you thought I’d love this, you fools! This is in fact like waking up in the afterlife only to find it’s just the guest bedroom of a painfully earnest thirty-something lump who’s munching on cookies and slotting mistagged chant.mp3 samples into a pad-slurred Fruity Loops tableau, forever.
[4]

Jer Fairall: Is Zalman King even making movies anymore?
[3]

John Seroff: The overwrought bombast gushing from every seam leaves Tellier’s too-gooey chocolate cherry open for parody.  Me, I’m seeing a pair of zombies espying one another across a flowered field.  Foaming and snarling in slow motion, they paw the air and stiffly shuffle to meet. Lipless mouths gape and dip, gnashing broken teeth passionately angling in for a kiss as the song crescendos.  Roll credits, sequel already in production.
[5]

Brad Shoup: As a French tone poem with a singular, quotidian detail, “Pepito Bleu” begs comparison to Gainsbourg’s “Melody” (the second half specifically). I’m also getting, as I’m wont to, vibes akin to the post-5:00 mark of Czesław Niemen’s “Bema Pamięci Żałobny – Rapsod”: grim timekeeping, mournful choir. The most explicitly cinematic thing I’ve ever heard on the Jukebox.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Evoking Vangelis, The Mission soundtrack, Enigma, New Pop-era Trevor Horn, and other kinds of subclassical schlock, this is almost beyond criticism, especially when Tellier thinks he’s Leonard Cohen in 1985 and starts gargling lubricious twaddle. I’m not the right person for this sort of thing.
[4]

Michaela Drapes: It’s official: There’s no further doubt in my mind that Sebastien Tellier is the secret lovechild of Harry Nilsson and Giorgio Moroder. I literally have absolutely no idea what’s going on here, or what this is even about — but it mashes every single one of my buttons with gross ferocity. More, please?
[8]

Edward Okulicz: His Sexuality LP struck me as fussy and sexless, his Eurovision entry was less “Divine” and more “Floaty Nonsense,” but I’ll give Tellier one thing: this song sounds like a nice pastel blue. But just as it’s getting good, it ends!
[5]