Coralie Clément

You wouldn't be blamed for assuming Coralie Clément is a contemporary of Françoise Hardy or Jane Birkin's; her coquettish and sultry, whispered vocals, suave touches of bossa and samba, and splashy dabblings in yé-yé make her sound like Brigitte Fontaine buffing out her scratches and sanding down her bristly edges.

Her debut LP, Salle des pas perdus, is a collaboration with her brother Benjamin Biolay, who wrote and arranged it, only further reinforcing her throwback nature. For a time during the 90s, Momus did a lot of his own Serge Gainsbourg-styled team-ups with elegant yet wryly sassy chanteuses—the Kahimi Karie songs, the Poison Girl Friend songs, the Laila France songs—and this record plucks at the same heartstrings.

The subsequent albums are interesting and possessed with the same sort of low-key charisma, with Toystore perhaps being the most aggressively different: in place of gentle strings and unhurried horns are skippy ukuleles, tinny tambourines, frothy farfisas.