French Films, White Orchid
Featured Album
The phrase “French Films” doesn’t generally evoke the happiest images: the last-act betrayal in Breathless, a stricken Jean Pierre-Leaud standing balefully on the beach in The 400 Blows, pretty much all of Shoot the Piano Player. So chalk up the fact that this impossibly hooky Finnish band chose it as their handle to either irony or bad translation. Or move right past it and get right to the main thing that matters: the songs. And what songs they are: French Films force-feed uppers to the Field Mice and kick the keyboard player out of New Order, delivering a batch of breathless Britpop-inspired songs with gargantuan choruses and guitar lines that glisten and glide like tiny tin airplanes. “Never let me go, never let me go,” is the central plea on the rocketing “Where We Come From” — which, sonically, is the Pains of Being Pure at Heart by way of recent Mikal Cronin. As if shaking free of songs this addictive were even an option.
