John & Jehn: 'John & Jehn'

Eddie Izzard once said that there’s a fine line between cool and uncool. One toothpick in your mouth - cool. Two - uncool. Well, French couple John and Jehn walk that line on their debut... and try so hard to be the former that they mostly end up as the latter.

These two upped and moved to London “…for the music… to put ourselves in danger. At some point we had to say, ‘Let’s go to fuckin’ war’.” Pretentious? Moi? Well, yes - these two are more-arch-than-thou, more-arch-than-me and for that matter just about everyone else.

That would be enough to put you off for good, but there’s more. They choose to make rather a big deal of being boyfriend/girlfriend (shock, horror), good looking (apparently Jehn is ‘mesmerising’, John is ‘chiselled’) and intellectual (they name drop David Shrigley into interviews). But so what if the music’s rubbish, right?

Well, partly right. Imagine The Sugarcubes and Velvet Underground fed through a Casio VL-Tone. J&J both lend vocals that epitomise the Gallic shrug - tuneless spoken word, drawling like a codeine addict, percussive yelps and self-consciously clever lyrics about, for example, how 20L07 stands for “age, love, heaven.” Sometimes all that posturing gets tiring. Sometimes it comes together = like on ‘You, Far Away’, which is particularly reminiscent of the Velvets. On ‘Survive’, you can almost mistake J&J for early Fall covering America’s ‘A Horse With No Name’… which is alright by me.

Elsewhere the monotony is all so cool, so what. Two toothpicks.

Released on 24th April 2008 by Universal.

Written by James Farrell.