“Cowgirl Frenchie” and hard rock classic revisited

This Parisian has been giving exciting concerts for a handful of years. We saw her at the Francofolies de la Rochelle in 2022, with a high-quality original repertoire. The young woman, who grew up surrounded by her parents' blues and soul discotheque, very quickly developed a tropism for American music and began writing songs from a very young age. A few years ago, she left her job to embark on a life as a singer-songwriter. The Sacred in the Ordinary is his first essay. It’s also a masterstroke.

From writing to composition, including singing, the thirty-year-old masters her business well. We are here at the level of the best Anglo-Saxon productions. It was while spending a year in Australia that she discovered the records of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, who quickly became her heroes. His first album is a concentrate of the best of Americana, between folk and country, with beautiful soulful touches, notably in well-felt brass arrangements. This sentimentality never descends into pathos, but its sensitive interpretation truly inhabits its melodies. Strings, choirs, the panoramic production of Sébastien Gohier makes this album the gem of this spring.

It is two years late that the British institution Deep Purple is celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its flagship album. Sixth in the discography of the group founded in London in 1967, Machine Head was released in March 1972. Along with Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple is considered a pioneering group of hard rock and what would later be called heavy metal.

As the Philharmonie de Paris prepares to celebrate the genre with great fanfare, the reissue of this standard comes at just the right time. Carried by the hit Smoke on the Water, the album became a rock classic. The song tells how the Montreux casino, where the group was to record the album, burned down the day before the sessions began during a Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention concert.

Half a century later, the latter's eldest son offers a new mix of the album in this copious box set which also includes two live discs. Ultimately recorded in a hotel in the Swiss city, Machine Head was the band's first record true to their live sound. Not to mention that this lineup of the group had some great instrumentalists within it: guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, organist Jon Lord, drummer Ian Paice, bassist Roger Glover and singer Ian Gillan. The compositions are precise and well-felt, the production direct and the interpretation well-felt. We can call this indestructible record a masterpiece, which has influenced so many groups, for better and sometimes also for worse!