Dita Von Teese

Album review

Gainsbourg and Birkin, Tellier and Von Teese. Daring, sure: but the comparison spatters off the face of Sparkling Rain, and shows up on Rendez-Vous and then La Vie est en jeu where our beauty howls in French. With a glamour tinged with eroticism, this first collaboration, inspired by pleasure, seduces with a mysterious air of unreality. The maestro of French style electro pop has offered the Venus of Michigan the ideal platform for the first striptease act to have ever really laid her bare. It was backstage at Crazy Horse that Tellier first met Von Teese. Who could be more iconic, more novel or more foreign, to be unleashed onto his tailor-made arrangements? He came back to her with a ready-made album, on which she would need to do nothing more than say yes, and lay down her vocals. Through his dark dandy glasses, worn almost askew, Tellier had a clear vision. A hail of sunbeam synths on sensual, poppy love songs written for four hands and his wife Amandine de la Richardière; an angular shadow rather than a mistress, Sparkling Rain fizzes with perfect comic-strip bubbles. © Charlotte Saintoin/Qobuz