One of my favorites, so much so that I’m confused why I haven’t posted this already. If you’re unfamiliar, Isabelle Antena is a French pop and jazz musician and composer, who began making music with her band Antena (whose highly influential Camino del Sol was one of the first records I ever posted here!). She went on to be a highly prolific solo artist, gaining a huge following in Japan–which makes sense aesthetically, as I think her sound very much anticipated Shibuya-kei. In fact, I grew up listening to Isabelle Antena because my dad heard the maddening “Quand Le Jazz Entre En Lice” in a hair salon in Tokyo, where my family was living at the time, and took it home to my mom, who got hooked on it. A lot of her live performances on YouTube were shot in Japan, like this particular gem.
Hoping For Love is jazzier than its excellent predecessor, En Cavale, but it has all the prowess you’d expect from Isabelle Antena, who wrote, arranged, and produced this record. Here she flits easily between Latin, samba, bossa nova, funk, and synth pop, with a few of her signature bass-driven dance floor twirlers like “Laying On The Sofa” and “Sweet Boy,” the latter of which I often catch myself singing to my dog. While it’s still strongly reminiscent of contemporaries like Sade and Linda di Franco, it’s fully her own world, spending most of the record’s second half squarely in the realm of acoustic jazz to terrific effects. Such a special, masterful record–I hope you love it as much as I do.
Camino del Sol is such a masterpiece, and so joyful. Can’t wait to sink into this one. And always so exciting to check the site and see a new writeup!
I love this album so much, too! I hope some day we get a full-blown Isabelle Antena renaissance and suddenly everything she did gets a big, beautiful reissue. Maybe if we bug Numero Group enough.
much love for this, thanks jen!
This is really delightful! Thanks for sharing. Zippyshare is scary… I went to youtube lol.