Michele Bry: Essentials Vol.1 (CD)

The takeaway coffee-drinking and pastel-colored tights-wearing Parisian girl makes an anticipated debut in the physical wold with a CD mixtape that convokes many of the miniature worlds that inspire her: purse/handbag microcosms, cereal box toys and diary doodles. Twee pop for our age <3

Rightfully titled "Essentials Vol.1", Michele Bry's debut mixtape is completely filler-free and stands  - sonically speaking - somewhen between Madonna's Ray of Light and Music albums. Deceitfully candid, it narrates the bittersweet existence of a young woman slowly biding farewell to adolescence. All the heavily-nostalgic tropes of childhood - watching cartoons in the morning ("cartoons and cereals"), getting ready for school ("3+3"), the stream-of-consciousness-type of writing in her diary ("j'adore") and Alice's rabbit ("two rabbits and a hat") - are soaked in a discreet but enduring pain. The narrator seems to be constantly torn between frustration and delusion, and regrets loom ("things I didn't do"). 

"Yet here I am, having metaphysical thoughts while brushing my hair"

Michele Bry gives to hear a fresh (French?) and singular alternative to the current resurgence of Y2K indie pop aesthetics as championed in a highly ironic manner by The Femcels and the World Peace DMT galaxy. The Paris-based singer focusses instead on a more lyrical - post Pastels, post Field Mice - early-2000's heritage: that of delicately watercolored bands like Trembling Blue Stars or The Postmarks. Moreover, she offers her own  twisted take on French-ism: the fruit of a vision skewed by her consumption of US medias - especially the kind that fantasize France (from Funny Face to Emily in Paris via Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette) - and further amplifies these fantasies before sending them back to the English-speaking world, via these 10+1 candy-perfumed and subtly melancholic pop songs.