Stuck In Our Head: "Rainbow" - Emilie Simon

Huge mournful, stabbing horn riffs, several stuttering piano-backed lulls in terms of structure followed by a huge emotional build-up that is consequently stuck in our head. Well done, Emilie Simon.

The Emilie Simon album, then...

So far, it's incredible. We'll report back when we've let it sink in a bit more.

A surreal Emilie Simon video...

There's a bit in this highly incredible video, where Emilie Simon gets caught up in a hurricane of books because someone left the ceiling fan on... Other bizarre things that happen in this video include a creepy man with TENTACLES for fingers, moving and shrinking walls, a melting staircase and a mirror doing fleshy shadow puppets.

Genuinely fabulous...

On the cover of Emilie Simon's third studio album, and first all-English-language opus, she is WEARING AN OCTOPUS. Do you see that? She has an octopus, not just stashed about her person, but upon her body. What a gorgeous and wonderfully detailed album cover. But then Emilie's album covers have always been stunning.

Below, you will find Emilie crawling with ladybirds on her eponymous debut album. Emilie as a bodyless bust, resplendent in lace on the cover of her second album Végétal. Emilie as a sort of ice mermaid on the cover of her soundtrack for nature documentary, March of the Penguins. And Emilie brandishing gardening shears on the cover of her American compilation album, The Flower Book.

Of course, this new artwork seems to mark a significant departure in style. Good thing, as the new album is (from what we've heard) a significant departure in style too. As we've mentioned before, Emilie is a hugely talented woman, melding strings, bells and flutes with electronics, so effortlessly, lushly and melancholically that it sounds truly effortless.

Her new album, The Big Machine, supposedly 'drops' towards the end of September.

Quelle surprise!!!

Emilie Simon is a French singer/songwriter and to be honest, truly fucking incredible. En France she's rather huge and has won awards and accolades galore. Elsewhere she's... well it's a sad state of affairs. We could write a thesis on how stubborn and ignorant English-speaking music audiences are and how unwilling they are to listen to music written in other languages, but we'll save it. Emilie Simon, however, like Camille before her, has clearly decided she'd quite like a slice of the pie outside her native land. We can't say we blame her. Having already released English language versions of things outside le monde Francophone, she now seems to be going for a fully English release. We'd verify this but we're lazy.

Anyway her new single, "Dreamland", has 'hit the webz' and it's hot hot hot. It signals a complete departure from her previous stuff. Where before she was sampling ice crunches, dropping little bells like snowdrops across her music and melding sawing synths with glacial strings, warbling about nature and love... now she's gone full pop. It's quite spectacs. There are some wobbly synth bits, and her lovely Gallic vocals and a huge pop tune in there. It's different from her previous stuff, but it's a delight nevertheless. Everyone wins.

Recommendations
"Désert" - Emilie Simon
"Flowers" - Emilie Simon
"All Is White" - Emilie Simon