Cat No CHIN200712

· An unusual, quite entrancing debut album by French quartet Centenaire, whose style is a mixture of indie folk and left-field pop music, but with many other contemporary and retro influences. Arthur Lee meets This Mortal Coil, possibly - but much else too. Their self-composed songs (in English) are often dreamy & acoustic, under-pinned by organ and over-laid with harmony vocals, reminiscent of Harper’s Bizarre or the Association.

· Centenaire were formed in January 2006 by Damien Mingus, Aurélien Potier and Orval Carlos Sibelius, and joined by Stephane Laporte later that year. The band uses a wide but subtle palette of instruments & sounds, including : charango, organ, guitars, cello, clarinet, metalophone, melodica, and voices, as well as fire, rivers, electric eels and insects, apparently !

· They cite influences such as the Penguin Café Orchestra, Pentangle, Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen, Delta Blues, Mark Hollis, Van Morrison, Slint, Motown, This Heat... and many more - although certainly some of those are more immediately audible in their music than others.