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With the help of wildly popular French-pop beau Dominique A, purring chanteuse Françoiz Breut breathes life back into the chanson, her pretty, moody, downbeat, beautifully-recorded record steeped in the history of the French songwriting tradition, with Breut's deep-and-crooning voice dexterously delivering songs flushed with a surfeit of syllables, songs telling dramas and melodrams of grand poetry and choice emotion. That said, while it's schooled in tradition, Vingt À Trente Mille Jours is a notably contemporary outing, A's dark and cinematic torch songs having more in common with the recent romanticism of Polly Harvey or Tindersticks than with classic Aznavour or Brel orchestrations. The majority of the set is penned by A, spaced out with only a couple of choice covers: a beautiful version of Peggy Lee's "Sans Souci," and a duet on "La Chanson D'Hélène" (well known for its prominent placement in Claude Sautet's Romy Schneider-starring "Les Choses de la Vie") that features the masculine murmurs of Joey Burns from Calexico. His appearance is notable, in that Vingt À Trente Mille Jours often favors a lilting country twang amidst its Gallic, gothic orchestrations, and this recalls some of the prettier dusty, dusky moods sketched by Burns' other band, Giant Sand.
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