3 out of 5

Label: Un-Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi

Produced by: Thackery Earwicket

Paco – I think – is a character, maybe played / performed by Arnaud Aymard, who is part of radio show / art project collective “Spectralex.” …That’s as far as I can get. The Spectralex site seems to host a mix of medias, and I can find some stray mentions of Aymard around and about outside of social media that I’m translating, but I’m sure that all of this would be clearer if I spoke French and was a cool French underground art and music dude. I’m not… any of those things.

Is this context important?

I think so. Label Un-Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi has also released “Les Comoronds” with Aymard, another Spectralex project, and Paco is, at least, music. Knowing that it’s part of an art project (or whatever) initially had me rating this down, because I was looking for something: in the same way that Les Comoronds is a puzzling release since it’s a recording (a very repetitive recording) of a non-musical show, that at least tells me it’s a kind of intentional artifact, so theoretically this Paco 7″ would exist for some similar reason. But, no, it’s really just a 7″ of a couple of songs. Maybe there’s some comedy happening here that, again, French-speaking me would understand – the title translates to “Paco sings for peace,” and the last track is definitely a kind of hands-across-American telethon riff; “RDA – RFA,” the other song (no idea on this, pardoning my ignorance again; I found one page suggesting RFA stands for Remise de Fin d’Année; an end-of-year rebate/refund), reminds me of like a Clash, rallying-type track, and it allows Paco / Aymard to get pretty amped up as he repeats the abbreviations over a building guitar strum.

And so if I set aside whatever I’d want to read into the recording, Paco Chante La Paix is totally fine acoustic pop – these two tracks are toe-tappy enough and recorded well, if not particularly memorable, and the interstitial sketches or whatever are short enough to not be offensive. Trying to parse the “why” isn’t going to lead me anywhere, but listening to it purely as music – it’ll do.