Yael Na M - Yael Naim - Music & Performance - CD

2007 sophomore album from the Paris-born and Israel raised singer, songwriter and musician who has also recorded under the name Yael. This album, which features songs sung in French, English and Hebrew, features the worldwide sensation 'New Soul', a track that has gained fame as being the music played during Apple's Macbook Air ad campaign in 2008. 13 tracks total. Warner.

What a difference a really, really thin laptop keyboard makes. As recently as New Years, French-Israeli chanteuse Yael Naim was, as they say, a "virtual unknown." She made a particularly charming and breezy sort of twee folk, and had a new album packed full of it, but only in France did listeners take much notice. And then came technology. Naim's track "New Soul," a whimsical piano head-bopper about not quite feeling at home in the world, was picked as the theme song for Apple's MacBook Air, and suddenly a meta sort of stardom occurred: the thing to do on your impossibly slender new computer was to head online and find that great song that had persuaded you to buy it.

It's not hard to unravel the appeal of "New Soul." The song trips along under the shaky firepower of a flatulent tuba and swooning "la la la" interludes, playing the singer as a wide-eyed misfit whose innocence can tell us a thing or two about our misplaced values. "But why all this hate/ Try to communicate," she rhymes plainly. And this persona turns up often on Yael Naim. String ballad "Far Far" describes a girl haunted by "a beautiful strange music," which, she eventually realizes, she must share with the world. Album closer "Endless Song Of Happiness" is a busker's guitar lullaby; it's sung in Hebrew (like several songs here), but the title and tone leave us without much need for translation.

Naim plays the na￯f role deftly. But the record is something more than a set of dreamy utopian ballads. Naim's mood can rise into something more brittle and punchy, as on excellent cut "Too Long" ("I irrigate illusions, then let them grow," she sings, more acidly than usual). And it can also sink into a finely wrought melancholy (absent the aw-shucks "happy end" of "New Soul"), as heard in "Lonely."

This emotional range is the mark of an artist with staying power, and it helps that Naim, working with David Donatien, uses a diverse -- but never over-busy -- sonic palette. "Too Long" is particularly clever in this regard, blending a soft keyboard wash with hand drums and synth blips. Perhaps the most successful (and necessary) use of the studio comes in the record's least likely track: a downtempo cover of Britney Spears' "Toxic." In Naim's and Donatien's hands, the club track becomes a hypnotic, quasi-trip-hop spell, shaped around glowing vibraphone and organ fuzz. Naim's voice has never sounded lovelier -- or, literally, more capable of magic.

By Jake Blaine