Chick Habit

Album review

1995's Chick Habit was a complete turnaround from the ultra-twee and largely acoustic pop of April March's self-titled debut EP. Taking off from a lifelong interest in French music and culture (the former Elinor Blake studied in the country as a teenager), Chick Habit is a note-perfect re-creation of French ye-ye music of the 1960s. March, whose voice is a dead ringer for France Gall's similarly perky tones, borrows heavily from Gall's style and repertoire. The title track is a fairly literal translation of one of Gall's biggest Serge Gainsbourg-penned hits, "Laisse Tomber des Filles," given a "Peter Gunn"-style twang guitar track and performed with a punky snarl. (The opening track is the same song performed in March's note-perfect French.) The remaining tunes are covers of other ye-ye songs, with the highlights being Jacques Dutronc's "Le Temps de L'Amour" (a 1966 hit for Dutronc's wife, Françoise Hardy), given a smoky reading highlighted by a Dick Dale-style surf guitar played by guest star Jonathan Richman (a friend of producer and multi-instrumentalist Andy Paley, who leads the excellent band), and another dip into Gall's catalog, the dreamy "Cet Air-La." April March would, in varying degrees, explore this French pop obsession over her next several albums, but this is its purest manifestation.
© Stewart Mason /TiVo