Music

Like that weird high-street shop PastTimes, Peyroux’s USP is to reproduce ancient artefacts and clean off the essential grime until you’re left with a series of elegant, slightly pointless plastic pastiches. Her squeaky, behind-the-beat delivery certainly recalls both Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf – with plenty of deliberate hesitation and stylised croaks – but it’s a sanitised, unravaged take on their legacy that ticks off the stylistic references (’30s swing, ’40s Gypsy jazz, ’50s C&W, ’60s Parisian chanson) without ever really engaging with their world.

There’s some exquisite musicianship on this follow-up to 2004’s ‘Careless Love’ (organist Sam Yahel is quite a find), but little of the engagingly bonkers behaviour that has defined her recent public persona. Peyroux sucks the energy from a clutch of great songs: Harry Nilsson’s rattling cowboy lament ‘Everybody’s Talkin’’ is turned into a mournful, half-speed dirge; Serge Gainsbourg’s sleazy girl-group shuffle ‘La Javanaise’ becomes a stately Edwardian waltz; while Charlie Chaplin’s beautifully bleak ‘Smile’ mutates into a jaunty swing shuffle, lacking the tears-of-a-clown subtext of the original. Save your money and instead dig out the more interesting downtown boho jazz of her 1996 debut ‘Dreamland’.