File under "Franglophiles"

>> Want another French group-of-the-moment? Meet Tahiti 80

by CHRIS YURKIW

It's not every day you're in a position to compliment a Frenchman on his English, so I seize the opportunity, only slightly influenced by the fact that Xavier Boyer is the leader of the latest, greatest French pop group since, uh, les Rythmes Digitales?

"Oh, thank you," says Boyer--vocalist, guitarist and main songsmith of Tahiti 80, who sings in the international language of money and music. "You know, I've studied English at university, and British and American literature. But what I always say is, 'I think I had good teachers, like Paul McCartney or John Lennon.'"

Yup, Boyer also went to that all-too-familiar school of Anglophilia, specializing in Brit-Invasion hypermelody and interpretive American jangle, and he can also tell you the current whereabouts of his other English and music instructors, as in the lyrics of "Mr. [Ray] Davies":

"He gave up pop music/ To play squash with Ringo Starr/ But that does not matter/ When you listen to his selected discography."

But hang on: Boyer and his three Normandian cohorts are not on some simple '60s guit-trip. With a name like Tahiti 80 (taken from one of those ol' vacation T-shirts), you might suspect a group of guys on a bit of an easy-listening tip, a little like compatriots Air, in the nod to 1980 and a penchant for fluttering, if primitive, synths--and you'd be absolutely right. Indeed, prodded into picking a point of contemporary reference, Boyer situates Tahiti 80 not in Anglo-American power pop nor French rock, but international (club) pop.

"I think that pop is going global, you know. And what I like about all these scenes is that even though they're making an Anglo-Saxon genre, they each have their own way of doing it. You know, Swedish bands like the Cardigans sound like Swedish bands. They've got this special way of playing jazzy chords. And you've got the Belgian scene which is more into Captain Beefheart, but with Belgian ears. So I think this is really exciting.

"And there is something French about our stuff," Boyer rightly insists. "It's the way we hear another music."

Piece by piece

Puzzle is a good title for Tahiti 80's debut album--and especially for the inquisitive Anglo who's wont to figure out just how the hell it all fits together. At the end of the day, T-80 are a bunch of French guys with one-length long hair trying to be a rock band like the Posies. But you wouldn't know it from their first North American single, "Heartbeat," basically a case of that culturally-superior French disco that will inevitably come out in the music of a group this close to Air and Daft Punk in their gloriously retrograde electroism and gush-nostalgia for the '70s of their youth. It's the single of the year (!), all four-on-the-floor thump (except for the bridge!), Haircut 100 guitars, and--for weirdo good measure--fuzz bass to jack it all into the realm of indie/underground sounds. Properly, Puzzle is hooked up to Chicago's Minty Fresh label in Amérique du Nord.

Then there's "Swimming Suit," the best merger of acoustic pop and electronica on the album, in which Big Star clarion chords are laid under Boyer's hushed voice, which moves in and out of the vocoder.

"Yeah, we're pretty much into the music of the '60s and the '70s," says Boyer. "But we also want to make modern records. Our aim is to share the same spirit as all those bands from the '60s, you know, they were all trying to make music for the future, not retro-sounding records. I think it's very important to keep on experimenting."

Which Tahiti 80 are doing, having recently collaborated on a song with Japanese kitty Kahimi Karie (in whose country Puzzle went gold), and undertaking the remix of others. Has the whole world gone crazy, or pop, or global?

"That's the good thing of today," says Boyer. "You can mix all sorts of music. Take Cornelius, in Japan: he just makes his own kind of music. He mixes elements from the Beach Boys and My Bloody Valentine or the Jesus and Mary Chain, and he makes something really personal out of that.

"I think it's really an open-minded era right now. And also it's really good because it's really democratic right now, because you can make records on your own, in your home studio. Not just electronic sounds but organic ones, too."

So after France, Europe, Japan, and now l'Amérique, all that's left for Tahiti 80 is to win hearts in their spiritual home, the Yoo-Kay. A handful of live gigs have already yielded some early reviews from the weeklies:

"They said we were unpredictable and brilliant," says Boyer. "But they also said we had terrible haircuts.

"I think a lot of British bands made their career on their hair."

With guests at Café Campus on Thursday, Sept. 14, 9pm, $10