Magic Mirror

Album review

These few piano notes and disco-pop rhythms at the beginning of Magic Mirror: we have already heard them somewhere else, in a song that always makes us dance and brings tears to our eyes. But of course! It's Abba's Dancing Queen, that eternal masterpiece of truly popular music. Pearl Charles, a young Californian with the face of a neo-hippie Madonna, undoubtedly loves the Swedish band as much as Fleetwood Mac, Carole King, Randy Newman or her contemporary, Lana Del Rey. Magic Mirror is her second album. This magic mirror is a rear-view mirror, which takes us back to the 70s, when everything was tinged with disco, when the music was played on a cassette car radio, at sunset. The mellow vintage keyboards, the weeping pedal-steel and the high-vaulting choirs take Pearl Charles's pop songs to an inherently Californian nirvana. She is not inventing anything new, but she is replaying it all with inspiration, in a hazy halo of reverie and melancholy, a bit like Sofia Coppola at the time of the film Virgin Suicides. Pearl Charles also reminds us of another gem, Lavender Diamond, another Californian female band with watercolour country-pop songs. Destined to make the listener nostalgic, this ravishing album looks like a summer love. In the middle of winter, it is always a good tonic. © Stéphane Deschamps/Qobuz