Cosmetique

The other day, I was strolling down memory lane, picking through the miscellanea of my early- and mid-2000s collections, and a grip of 1234 Records releases cropped up.

1234 was an outgrowth of PPQ Records, home to some of London's more leftfield electronic and electroclash sounds of the era. Unlike PPQ, though, 1234 occupied itself with artists who fell in the rock and indie brackets; an all-time favorite of mine, Whitey, released a fair amount of his early solo material with them.

And one of the groups also in that orbit was Cosmetique, a sort of post-Brit-pop concern that fiddled with the formula by integrating some 60s Frenchy seductiveness and craggy blues rock into the template.

And then they had these moments of novelty tomfoolery as well, like with their version of Laura Braniga's Italo version of Umberto Tozzi's "Gloria," reconceived as a Europop memorial, of sorts, to Princess Diana.