Alex Gopher You, My Baby, & I (V2)

Alex Gopher

You, My Baby, & I (V2)

Sacre bleu! Who would have suspected that the French could be so funky? This is, after all, the country that brought us such excruciatingly un-funky cultural snafus as Euro-Disney, Jacques Tati, and Jean-Luc Picard. Okay, Brigitte Bardot was pretty funky in her day, but what have they done for us lately? Well, on top of Daft Punk, Air, and a host of lesser DJs and dance crews, add Alex Gopher, veteran electronica producer. You, My Baby, & I expands on Gopher's obvious infatuation with slick, Seventies-era disco chops, burbling background beats, and outright funk tunes. "Party People," with its goofy shouted chorus ("Where the party people at?!") sounds like a Studio 54 refugee, while the smooth house groove "Tryin'" has dancefloor smash scrawled all over it in glittery silver paint-pen grafitti. While there's nothing particularly revelatory about what Gopher is doing here, his flawless production -- particularly on the subtle, soothing closer "Quiet Storm" -- brings to mind everything from Barry White to the more recent work of David Holmes, who did the music for Steven Soderbergh's criminally underrated Out of Sight. Loose, funky, and utterly without pretense, You, My Baby, & I is another link in what appears to be the French's global musical apology for all those years of forcing the criminally overrated cartoon triumvirate of Babar, TinTin, and Asterix on legions of impressionable youngsters. It's about time.