The French Connection: L'Americana à la française...

Ah, 'tis the season. The rainy season. The getting dark early season. The season prone to slightly melancholic music. Or is it already The End Of The Season? To Redeye, it is. The French singer-songwriter who is behind the Redeye moniker, has studied the art of Americana well, and brings a pretty perfect simulation of the real thing made in France. 'All tracks written and performed by G. " Redeye" Fresneau' reads the booklet, somewhat akwardly. Mr. Fresneau seemingly hides his first name to, uh, hide that he's a dyed in the wool Frenchman, maybe? It's okay, Guillaume, Windows Media's automatic album recognition destroyed the mystery. Redeye's wish for authentic Americana-ness is cute, if not a little overzealous. Until this album, I have never seen a booklet proudly announce where it was printed. But since End Of The Season's was printed in Oregon, the booklet proudly announces this, as if to say 'See how Americana we Frenchmen really are? Even our booklet comes from there!'. 

There is, however, a good reason that Redeye's music sounds so close to the originals it tries to emulate: Fresneau spent four formative years in Austin, Texas, one of the capital's of No Depression/Americana. And like fellow Texans Midlake, there is a good amount of folk and psych elements in Redeye's music. D'ailleurs, the preferred nomenclature for his music, as per Fresneau, is psych-folk, but whatever you want to call it, it's really nice mood music if you are in the mood for some autumnal melancholy. 

This is the kind of sadly beautiful Americana that I would have killed for twenty five years ago and am still A okay with today. The tempo never rises above midtempo and Redeye draws in the same coloring book for most of this album.On the other hand, he has a real knack for this kind of music and this can proudly be put with your other melancholy Americana/singer-songwriter albums. Lucile Vallez' mournful violin wanders through most of these songs and give them a big part of their appeal, though there is also some tasteful accordion and saxophone on the cajun-style "Sunny Roads" and some horns on "Cold As Ice". This isn't just some guy strumming on his acoustic guitar, but beautifully produced music. It also seems no coincidence that the latter two songs with their expansion of Redeye's sound find themselves in the middle of the record, as if Redeye realized that to fight a certain sameyness in his music it would be wise to color a bit outside the lines on these tracks. A trumpet accompanies "Season's Ending" as well, another welcome bit of offsetting the usual instrumentation.   

Since this, his debut album, Fresneau has turned Redeye into a real band, now normally going under (This Is) ReDeYe, still plowing that psych-folk-Americana field he first worked on End Of The Season. But check out the beginnings of Fresneu's faux Americana (Fauxmericana?), because it's better than quite a bit of the 'authentic' stuff...