Yep, there’s more to Carla Bruni than lingerie shoots and French presidents. The scion of classical musicians from Turin, it turns out she has a pretty decent set of pipes too, in an insouciant lying-around-in-a-baby-doll-dress-while-a-Gitanes-burns-in-the-ashtray kinda way. She’s also got good taste in poets. The songs on No Promises, her second album, now re-released in the wake of her high profile romance with Nicolas Sarkozy, have been adapted from the verse of Yeats, Auden, Rossetti, Walter de la Mere, Dorothy Parker and Emily Dickinson.
If nothing else, the interpretations of the latter’s poems give lie to the old saw about the Belle of Amherst’s strict meters all being tailor cut to the tune of ‘Yellow Rose Of Texas’. In fact, ‘I Felt My Life With Both My Hands’ is successfully extracted from 19th century austerity and set to a mid-paced country rock riff, and the almost sassy ‘If You Were Coming In The Fall’ is possessed of a fine set of hips.
The words are of course exquisite, so there’s no shortage of lyric sheet scanning to be done when the music gets too worthy – which, to be fair, is not often. No Promises is pitched somewhere between Norah Jones and Mazzy Star, only occasionally suffering from the same MOR sensibility that sometimes afflicted Anjani Thomas’s Blue Alert.
So, notwithstanding the odd Knopflerism, this is a tastefully recorded and rendered record. Willie B’s ‘Before The World Was Made’ is a breathy, weightless slow waltz, and de la Mare’s ‘Autumn’ is as pleasantly tipsy as the walk back to work after an illicit lunchtime snifter. Parker’s ‘Afternoon’, on the other hand, is a feline strut with Ribot-esque guitar overdubs courtesy of Louis Bertignac, while Auden’s ‘At Last The Secret Is Out’ makes for a stately, elegant closer.
And I have to say, while it pains me to agree with Monsieur Sarkozy on anything, that accent is pretty hard to resist.