Carla Bruni - No Promises (2007)

Artist...............: Carla Bruni
Album................: No Promises
Genre................: Folk
Source...............: Cd
Year.................: 2007
Ripper...............: Exact Audio Copy
Codec................: FLAC
Information..........: TntVillage
Covers...............: Front
Total Size...........: 222 Mb


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After the runaway success of her charming, folksy first album Quelqu'un M'a Dit, Carla Bruni's

sophomore effort takes a more difficult route and sees her setting canonical works by such poets as

Yeats and Emily Dickinson to music, often calamitously. W.H. Auden's "At Last the Secret Is Out"

offers a case in point. Set to a brisk Jack Johnson-style swinging guitar, the poem becomes stripped

of all its meaning: no one word is allowed to stand out, as each line is madly shoehorned into a

sensible rhythm, and the wistful, yearning tone of the poem gets lost in the breezy melody of the

song. Therein lies the problem. Bruni's blues guitar template is too rigid to allow these words to

breathe. The lines "Wrapping that foul body up/In as foul a rag" in Yeats' "Those Dancing Days Are

Gone" are delivered almost winsomely, where in fact the word "foul" should be allowed to drag, and to

weigh down the rest of the line. Metered verse cannot fit this sort of verse-verse-chorus model. Of

course, an album must be judged on its musical merits, and the overall mixture of rhythm and pedal

steel guitars, with a touch of harmonica here and there, is a serviceable foil to Bruni's smoky

voice. But even here, one would wish for more clarity in the line readings: the breathlessness of her

singing means that sentences often fizzle out. Dorothy Parker's stark "Afternoon" is maltreated in

this way, as is Emily Dickinson's wonderful poem "I Felt My Life with Both My Hands" -- and the

absurd jauntiness of both songs is almost unbearable. The one highlight of the set is the doo wop

piano-and-guitar jam on Dickinson's "If You Were Coming in the Fall," which lends itself oddly well

to Bruni's sauce. But this is an impersonal set of disparate poems set often unimaginatively to

incongruous arrangements. It is a brave failure, but a failure nonetheless.


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Tracklist
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01. Those Dancing Days Are Gone
02. Before The World Was Made
03. Lady Weeping At The Crossroads
04. I Felt My Life With Both My Hands
05. Promises Like Pie-Crust
06. Autumn
07. If You Were Coming In The Fall
08. I Went To Heaven
09. Afternoon
10. Ballade At Thirty-Five
11. At Last The Secret Is Out