Yacoub

Gabriel Yacoub was the bandleader of Malicorne, who is widely regarded as the finest flowering of the '70s French folk revival. He later became more of a neo-trad singer/songwriter than a strict folklorist. A mordant wit dominates his work as he relates tales of surreal journeys, post-war survival techniques, and barbed romance via a rough-textured, detached, yet ardent tenor. Sardonic imagery is couched in gutty cellos, Irish bagpipes, urgent whispers, acoustic guitars, shakers, fragments of filigree-like Flemish song, and a hurdy-gurdy. An achingly pure soprano shines through the shadowy ether of Yacoub's fever dreams like a comet over a battlefield. Certain tunes hark back to acoustic heroes like the early Donovan, notably on "Dame: Petit Dame," almost a finger-picked, French-language "Jennifer Juniper." But while the Scots troubadour professed to be innocence incarnate, Yacoub seems to ruefully recollect a state utterly foreign to him. "Le Poids du Passe" is at once a courtly conceit straight out of a medieval chanson and a contemporary art piece. The compositions are a canny melange of far-flung antique sources plus traces of Philip Glass, Lou Reed (during his Berlin period), Pink Floyd, and, especially, modern French song at its most earthy and artificial. Having evolved past the brilliant bombast of his early career with his ego intact and still hungry, the mature Yacoub is self-involved, uningratiating, and icily impassioned. He also demonstrates perverse amusement at the caprices of fate and even transient flashes of unwilling tenderness.