KEREN ANN - Keren Ann Review

On 2004's Not Going Anywhere, Israeli-born Parisian Keren Ann Zeidel seemed like another gauzy Norah Jones-style pop chanteuse. But her records have gotten steadily, and fetchingly, stranger. Her latest, keren ann, is a coiled soft-rock song cycle about love's wreckage that, like her recent Lady & Bird side project, echoes pastoral '60s and '70s psychedelia. But the beauty is often dark and sepulchral, recalling early Velvet Underground and the hallucinatory country noir of Lee Hazelwood in particular. Sung in English, it's still très French....full text If Serge Gainsbourg were still alive, he would doubtless be in hot pursuit of Keren Ann Zeidel. Born to a Russian- Israeli father and Dutch-Indonesian mother, she moves between Paris, Israel and New York, and makes music which puts you in mind of long, lazy spring mornings in artfully disarrayed loft apartments. Her fifth album is every bit as intoxicating as her last two....full text In previous years, I had been switched on by electronically inclined divas like Goldfrapp and head-kicked by power chord strumming lasses like Be Your Own Pet's Jemina Pearl. Yet in 2007, I've lent my attention, at least in part, to jazzy, continental chanteuses like The Bird and the Bee's Inara George, and the always delightful Leslie Feist, whose new album The Reminder still has me drunk on its soulful charms. So it should come as no huge surprise that I've just as easily become enchanted by the slow, sultry torch song of Israeli-born, Parisian-lived, New York located songstress Keren Ann Zeidel....full text