Free and legal MP3 from Tahiti 80 (carefree English-speaking French pop done right)

"Unpredictable" - Tahiti 80
     Carefree English-speaking French pop from a band doing it before it was a genre. There's something not only charming but truly satisfying about a song that works quite so well both for people who are barely paying attention and for people paying close attention. This is no small feat. For the first group, a jaunty, smoothly sung tune is all that's required. Great background music. The second group is trickier to please, as the music has to display a sort of depth that jaunty, smoothly sung tunes by their nature often lack.
     The depth here, for me, is rooted in the song's offhanded musicality. "Unpredictable" is full of interesting moments that whisper rather than shout as they unfold. Listen, for instance, to the very start: we hear a basic drumbeat that the ear expects to be established through four standard measures but instead--there for us to notice, or not--it's interrupted after three seconds, in the second measure, which grounds the song in a sort of percussive pre-introduction. Only after that comes the standard four-measure intro. Listen, as another example, to the subtle adjustments the melody makes in the verse and how seductively singer Xavier Boyle wraps his faintly textured tenor around them: the way the melody mimics the keyboard riff at 0:23; the slow then fast pacing in the phrase "knock me down" at 0:31; the way the verse line is shortened and turned on the unresolved phrase "on the wall" at 0:35; and that's just in the first verse. I give the band points, too, for an entirely different kind of craftiness--how the song title comes not from the chorus but from the verse. That's rare in a chipper number like this one; anyone seeking only the inattentive audience will place the title where it repeats most obviously.
     Bouncing along since 1993, Tahiti 80 is quartet from Rouen, France. "Unpredictable" is from the album Activity Center, the band's fourth, which has been out for a year in Europe; its U.S. release comes, at last, later this month.