No Promises

法国超级名模继首张百万畅销专辑后首张英文大碟 法式香颂 + 民谣弹唱 + 轻爵士浪漫风 + 隽永诗篇的极致经典 Carla Bruni在2003年推出个人第一张法语香颂创作专辑Quelqu'un M'a Dit后大受好评，摆脱原本是「专业模特儿」的形象，成功转型为创作型女歌手。 今年她再度出击，推出第二张个人专辑，此次英语专辑的歌词体现出十九世纪与二十世纪早期诗人的意境：像专辑中"Before the world was made" (William Butler Yeats)，"Autumn" (Walter de la Mare) ，"Promiseslike Pie-Crust" (Christina Georgina Rossetti) 与"Afternoon" (Dorothy Parker) 。在曲风方面，Carla Bruni忧鬱的歌声，唱出极具感情的乡村蓝调，但也不失流行感。 《No Promises》专辑你会发现Carla Bruni那种饱满的音符，许多创作和演唱都表达了Carla Bruni所历所感而且每个音符之间的距离都非常明显，专辑的整体是经过深思熟虑的，有意识地弥漫出一种温馨家庭式的温暖。 Carla Bruni的这张唱片贴合了一个用岁月洗练出的决心。通过这张No Promises新作Carla Bruni将带你进入布满焦虑与分裂情绪的唱片，这张专辑所有音乐元素都是现成的，一切都是显得和谐有致，绝无片刻的冷场，Carla Bruni自身音乐素养在这张专辑中明显体现出来，按这样的要求发展下去Carla Bruni一定还会为我们带来很多年的惊喜。 After the runaway success of her charming, folksy first album Quelqu'un M'a Dit, Carla Bruni's sophomore effort takes a more difficult route and sees her setting canonical works by such poets as Yeats and Emily Dickinson to music, often calamitously. W.H. Auden's "At Last the Secret Is Out" offers a case in point. Set to a brisk Jack Johnson-style swinging guitar, the poem becomes stripped of all its meaning: no one word is allowed to stand out, as each line is madly shoehorned into a sensible rhythm, and the wistful, yearning tone of the poem gets lost in the breezy melody of the song. Therein lies the problem. Bruni's blues guitar template is too rigid to allow these words to breathe. The lines "Wrapping that foul body up/In as foul a rag" in Yeats' "Those Dancing Days Are Gone" are delivered almost winsomely, where in fact the word "foul" should be allowed to drag, and to weigh down the rest of the line. Metered verse cannot fit this sort of verse-verse-chorus model. Of course, an album must be judged on its musical merits, and the overall mixture of rhythm and pedal steel guitars, with a touch of harmonica here and there, is a serviceable foil to Bruni's smoky voice. But even here, one would wish for more clarity in the line readings: the breathlessness of her singing means that sentences often fizzle out. Dorothy Parker's stark "Afternoon" is maltreated in this way, as is Emily Dickinson's wonderful poem "I Felt My Life with Both My Hands" — and the absurd jauntiness of both songs is almost unbearable. The one highlight of the set is the doo wop piano-and-guitar jam on Dickinson's "If You Were Coming in the Fall," which lends itself oddly well to Bruni's sauce. But this is an impersonal set of disparate poems set often unimaginatively to incongruous arrangements. It is a brave failure, but a failure nonetheless.