Amour Toujours

Having made an initial splash on her first two albums with sprightly dancefloor pop, as well as an initial attempt to look to English-language audiences, on Amour Toujours Lio often took a calmer road that harked back to earlier styles of French music, a move slightly paralleled in the classy cover photo courtesy of the legendary Robert Doisneau. Still, Amour Toujours is hardly simply a re-creation of the past — producer Alain Chamfort had an ear for then state-of-the-art radio-friendly sounds, as the full thwack of the drums on "La Reine des Pommes" makes clear from the start. But for all the immediate airwave appeal, it's quite striking both how Lio sounds a little smoother and more confident on many tracks and how various orchestral and other instruments interweave with the straight-up rock sounds throughout. The sudden brass break toward the end of "La Vérité Toute Nue," the concluding strings on the moody highlight "J'Aime un Fantôme," and the piano on "Je Voudrais Bien Me Sentir Mal" all highlight this tendency well, and Lio's performances are appropriately top-notch. At points Chamfort creates a full-on retro background — there's nothing but strings and brass on the near waltz-time "Grenade," while the piano-led, easily swinging "Plus Je T'Embrasse" is a pure delight. Meantime, songs like the almost ska-paced "Zip a Doo Wah" show that the total kineticism of her earlier work has hardly gone away, and is merely directed toward other goals. As part of the 2006 reissue, an extended version of "Zip a Doo Wah" is included, as well as other tracks from the time, including assorted holiday numbers like "Noël" and "Sleighride" as well as her contemporaneous hit single "Tétéou."