This CD appeared in Amazon's weekly new releases listing eight years ago, and was an instant buy for me on the strength of the cover and the track list. I had never heard of the band Carmel before. The CD cover art, seen also as the cover image of the YT videos below, took a few seconds to sink in and then got a smile out of me, then a chuckle. That is the band's frontwoman Carmel McCourt on the cover.
It seems Carmel was a UK-based power pop trio with a drum'n'bass sorta sound, whose heyday was in the 1980s and 1990s during which they released a number of CDs, and then disappeared from view. In 2012 this singular CD "Strictly Piaf" appeared. Nine songs made famous by the sparrow (some even penned by her, I think), but here have undergone a sea change into something strange. The videos below (three samples, and the first album track "Running" in its entirety) give an idea but do not do the album justice. Some songs are translated into English, others sung in the original French. Some are given the power pop treatment, others are approached differently. The sample of "La Vie En Rose" in the first YT video shows a layered ethereal approach. Altogether a bold, creative and utterly original set of covers of Piaf staples. Every one of them is enjoyable, but my favorites are Autumn Leaves, Sous Le Ciel De Paris, and most of all Les Amants D'Un Jour which is given the power pop treatment and has an intoxicating flow to it that sweeps all before it.