SEBASTIEN TELLIER Vinyl & CDs

Review: It may be his umpteenth studio album, but "Domesticated" feels like Sebastien Tellier's "comeback" set- a feeling enhanced by the genuine sparsity of material from the swooning Frenchman in recent years. He says his aim while recording the set was to create a "new lush, futuristic pop sound", and to a degree he has succeeded. Variously informed by warm ambient, vividly coloured future R&B, downtempo synth-pop, Balearica, '80s synth-pop and the deeper end of the electrofunk spectrum, the resultant songs are immersive, comforting and undeniably warming. While it's perhaps not cutting edge in the way he intended, it's wonderfully polished, slick and entertaining, with Tellier's distinctive drawl remaining the focal point throughout.

Review: It is almost ten years since Sebastien Tellier composed the soundtrack to Narco, a curious but well-regarded French film about a narcoplectic. While it didn't exactly launch Tellier's career (he was already fairly well known in his native France), it does feature some of his best work, most notably the stunning "La Ritournelle" (and a number of similar compositions using the same key melody). It's this style - a mix of soaring strings, baggy beats, dancing flutes, twinkling pianos and sassy atmospherics - at which Tellier has always excelled. Narco is the best example of the bearded lothario's work in this style, too, making it an essential purchase for those who dig his sleepy downtempo grooves.

Review: "Don't listen to my record, listen to my message, vibrate to my music, let's merge our dreams, together spreading our combined energy in an immense blue wave that will flood the world - and the truth with emerge."

Announcing his long awaited return with this distinct message, Sebastien Tellier bounds back to the forefront of our collective musical conscience with his highly anticipated fourth studio album, My God Is Blue.
It's a record whose message is powered by something almighty, by some higher plane, by something much more spiritually significant than anything else the Parisian artist has composed to date. It's an album harbouring a prophetic philosophy and a vision of ideality, an album whose music seeks to not only entertain, inspire and charm, but also to create a community of like minded individuals searching to follow their dreams, and find their true path in life.
"I'd finished my tour for Sexuality and needed to recharge and re-motivate myself to go and make a new record," says Tellier. "But I was a little bit... lost. I was looking for a subject that I was passionate about." It was this search, this quest for spiritual and musical inspiration that led Tellier to take heed of the advice that "to be able to make pure music, you have to focus on removing yourself, distancing yourself from your dreams."

As such, Tellier began to notice a pattern in his dreams, and one which would go on to become the foundation of his latest oeuvre: "It had a really strong effect on me, I realised that I had blue dreams, I was having blue visions. When I went back to Paris to start making music, I wrote while thinking about what this meant, thinking about blue dreams, about spirituality, about truth."

With inspiration firmly back in place - the quest to understand and to realise one's dreams - the creation of My God is Blue was able to commence. Starting things off in his usual manner, Tellier went about composing his newest creation in his studio in his apartment, before completing the record alongside reputed producer and Ed Banger stalwart, Mr Flash. "Each song holds a message within to be uncovered" says Tellier of the lyrical thread of the album. Leading single and opening track, the choral, grandiose 'Pepito Bleu' for example, carries the missive of "self reinvention" and "having the imagination to dream."

Citing artists such as "Michael Jackson [and] George Michael" as musical inspirations for this album, it's clear the Tellier hasn't lost his knack or desire for a pop pinch and serious dance floor appeal. A track such as 'Cochon Ville', for example, plays host to enrapturing rhythms and outlandishly catchy melodic hooks designed to entrance, mystify and seduce the listener as only Sebastien Tellier knows how, and to "put the imaginary, put dreams back at the centre of our consciousness."

Throughout his career, Tellier has been inspired, almost infatuated with different mentally, spiritually and physically provocative subjects, with each such infatuation going on to conceive a vision and a theme for an album. From 2004's Politics, through to the hugely successful Sexuality in 2008, Tellier has spent the past decade practising and mastering the art of igniting a flash of inspiration into a blazing inferno of realised creativity. "I'm always inspired by a current subject, like sexuality, politics, and truth were the subjects of my first album. But in fact, you need to talk about the mystery of these subjects."

It's this mystery that provides the real spark to these 12 tracks, with deep rooted philosophy woven through the album's core and transmitted through mystical, sumptuous, spirited lyrics. There's a vision encompassed in each melodic transition and shift, but more than that, there's an invitation to enlightenment that pulsates through the essence of the songs, a vision and a promise which is strengthened by the union, the kinship of the online community being built around and through the music, L'Alliance Bleue (The Blue Alliance). "The aim of L'Alliance Bleue is to create a place of freedom that's what L'Alliance Bleue is to me, in a literal sense." A collective with an "ambition to revolutionise our relationship with the world and all it contains", Tellier aspires to create an "an amusement park for adults", an online community where 'followers' are invited to share visions and to build ideas together under the musical guidance of My God Is Blue, a veritable discotheque of light, of colour, of spiritual vibrancy and of shimmering vision.

From the first rattles of debut single 'Fantino' back in 2001, through to the enduring popularity of 2005's sumptuous 'La Ritournelle' and the smash hit success of Eurovision touted 'Divine', Tellier has proved himself to be the undisputed king of a pop classic with a psychical, sensual and physical pull. His latest work presents a transcendental record of far reaching prowess and a road to a thoroughly modern, community led enlightenme

Review: The album that everybody is talking about. 'Sexuality' is produced by Sebastien Tellier, alongside Daft Punk's half Guy-Manuel De Homem-Christo.