6633

French pop sensation Toog aka Gilles Weinzaepflen croons with a swagger almost entirely absent in pop music since the 1960s. His deep, soulful vocals and witty charm place him in a realm reserved almost exclusively for those chanteurs and composers of the '60s like Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Brel, and Scott Walker. And certainly his debut record does not stray far from that niche in which he fits so well. 6633, recorded almost entirely in French, is a collection of poppy ditties filled with cute, cinematic bleeps, stringy synthesizers, tinkly xylophones, and eerie theremins whirring in the background. 6633 is truly an orchestra of strange electronic instrumentation. Occasionally, Toog funks things up with vocal filters and some electro-synth pop blips but stays true to Le Grand Magistery's highly stylized Euro-pop fashion, like a Jean-Luc Godard film come to life on record. The strangest part of 6633 is the French to English translation of the liner notes where the nuances of certain phrases are lost or mistranslated so that their literal translations won't sound stiff and unnatural. Although the record is phenomenal, in print the wordplay reads rather clumsily. Understandably, this is no fault of Toog's and can only be blamed on the language barrier. All in all, Toog's 6633 is a brightly happy and comical collection of some of Europe's finest pop music to emerge in decades.