CD: Sophie Hunger – Supermoon

Any album with a guest appearance from Eric Cantona is going to attract attention. The eighth track of Sophie Hunger’s Supermoon, “La Chanson d’Hélène”, is a sumptuous, string-infused reflection on identity with Serge Gainsbourg-style spoken interjections by Cantona. But it’s not the whole story of this by turns direct and subtle album.

Head straight to what follows “La Chanson d’Hélène”. “We are the Living’s” jazzy swing and sparse arrangement suggests a liking for Jimi Hendrix’s pensive side. Elsewhere, on “Superman Woman,” Australian musical autobiographer Courtney Barnett is namechecked. Although the multi-lingual Supermoon casts its net wide, its voice is singularly contemplative.

Hunger – Émilie Jeanne-Sophie Welti – is a Swiss national. Born into a diplomatic family, she spent time in her youth in Bonn and London. More recently, she has lived in Berlin and Zurich. Last year, she fetched up in San Francisco, where she completed Supermoon with hot, all-analogue producer John Vanderslice. The immediate-sounding result has a warmth which could never have come from a digital recording.

Supermoon is Hunger’s sixth album (one was a live set) and has already topped the Swiss charts and sold strongly in Austria and Germany. In music-biz terms, as “GSA", the three countries are one market. Whether the UK release will help her break the Anglophone world is a tough call, though as it's her most coherent album so far, she has a better chance than previously. In the past, she lacked focus and kept one foot in the jazz world (hinted at here on the atmospheric German-language “Die Ganze Welt" and the dark, trip-hopish, Art Tatum-inflected “The Age of Lavender”). She had also allowed the shadow of Pixies’ quiet-loud songwriting formula to loom large, but that's now in the past. Although neither the deluxe version of the album with six extra tracks nor the DVD accompanying some editions were supplied for review, on the available evidence there’s no reason why the intimate, moody Supermoon shouldn’t make a mark.

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Overleaf: watch the video for the title track from Sophie Hunger’s Supermoon