Unless you're fluent in French, Marianne Dissard's new disc,
L'Entredeux, won't mean as much to you as other break-up albums like Bob Dylan's
Blood on the Tracks, Beck's
Sea Change, and Richard and Linda Thompson's
Shoot Out the Lights. Written after the dissolution of her marriage to fellow Arizona-based Frenchie Naïm Amor, the album doesn't even come across as that sad. Lush, yes. Gorgeous, sure. Maybe a touch woeful, but still sophisticatedly swishy and even a bit spaghetti Western-ish. The latter can be traced to her main collaborator, Joey Burns of Calexico, who wrote most of the music after she gave him a tape of some of her favorite artists (including Serge Gainsbourg, Nico, and Ennio Morricone). The result plays like a Truffaut film shot in the desert, with Dissard breathily crooning poetic, occasionally risqué lyrics over twangy guitars, waltzing accordions, and sawing strings. Listening to it, you can't help imagining Amor thinking he screwed up big time. After all, who wouldn't want a hot French woman to murmur, "Thank you for cold feet and your hands to massage them/Thank you for the white sheets and the creaking mattress"? Not to mention the fact that during the 2004 presidential election, Dissard formed the Tucson Suffragettes, a cabal of ladies who rooted out "virgin voters." Wow, the French can make even voter registration hot.
Marianne Dissard plays with Swedish expat crooner Andrew Collberg and Marc Matos & Os Beaches.
Wed., April 29, 9 p.m., 2009
