L'autre...

Ooh. It's like Madonna if Madonna were more interesting. Lovely stuff.

High school French class kindled my love of French pop music, and a friend of mine who spent some time in France kept that love kindled by sending cassettes with French pop hits after high school. I believe that is how I was already familiar with Désenchantée - a fantastic song that I was thrilled to listen to after all these years. The rest of the album is great. Love this blast of great French 90’s pop!

I've always liked Mylène Farmer and I happened to live in France when this album came out. It was huge, and this very dramatic French pop makes me think so vividly of 1991 there.

Obviously never heard this before given it's a French album from 1991, but it obviously won a few awards so it's a bit of a BIG DEAL, ya know? Anyway it sounds like Madonna crossed with Enya. Not my chosen style but I honestly can't say it's an awful sound. Flows easily, just enjoys a happy little space for a while. There's even a song that sounds like a direct knockoff of Vogue! Good addition to the user list. 4/5.

Rating: 8/10 Best songs: Désenchantée, L’autre, Je t’aime melancolie

Magnéfique. Good early 90s vibes

Chill and too cool for school French music

An interesting mix. Landing somewhere between a cool, international 90s trip hop and cheesy 80s smash pop hits. I’d happily listen again.

It was a big frustration to get hold of this album anywhere. On the streaming services I can only find an instrumental version (no idea why that exists). In the end I succeeded. I'm not sure if it was the worth the effort. The music is commercial French pop. Not bad, but it does not make me very happy either. I was surprised that I recognized the hit single Désenchantée. I'll give it three (instead of two) stars for the fact it is not from the UK or USA.

Most of this vocal-focused fare from the early '90s has aged about as well as rotting meat, and this LP is no different. The instrumentals are what date this so badly, the airy synth pads and gated reverb drums firmly damning this album to forever sound like a product of its time. Farmer's singing itself is great, but unfortunately is caked over by a heavy layer of production and reverb that obscure the real star of the show!

Amazing album..

I liked this, it was pretty cool and reminded me of bits of other artists.

Like a French Kate Bush. pretty cool.

June 26, 2025 HL: “Désenchantée”, title track, “Regrets”, “Beyond My Control” Turns out Mylène Farmer is a major cinephile. The sultry tones of John Malkovich and John Hurt aside, there’s some pretty solid synthpop here. Kinda Pet Shop Boys in parts, a little Madonna in others. The crow actually reflects a slight gothic tinge in the music, as heard in “Agnus Dei” and “Beyond My Control”. Genre-wise, synthpop is pretty well-represented in the 1001, but the French sure aren’t. I’m conflicted on whether L’autre was a missed inclusion; I’m only just learning about her popularity in Europe today. But my ears love this dark, romantic, art pop stuff, so I’m rounding up to a 4 regardless. I was surprised to see that she was brought up in Quebec before moving to France. La belle province in particular has been well represented on the generator recently, with *three* Montreal acts.

Meh

I've never heard Mylène Farmer before, but this was pretty good for what it is. Torchy, well-produced pop. It gets a little overwrought in tone to the point where it gets silly in places, but I enjoyed it well enough. The reviewer who described this as a blend of Madonna and Enya is so on point. Fave Songs: Je t'aime mélancolie, Beyond My Control, L'autre..., Regrets, Pas de doute

A little too Euro-synthpop for me, not an edge in sight. Anime music comes to mind. Inoffensive, and she has a nice voice; I don't have even a little French so the lyrical side is lost on me.

Pleasant enough, not that interesting though. 3 stars.

A pleasant french Enya pop vibe. Pretty and smooth, though nothing really engaged me... beyond my control was the most surprising with its Art of Noise attempt.

It's pretty. She looks like Reba, but doesn't sound anything close to Reba... The album is interesting. but really seems trapped in the 80s/90s techno-pop of Kylie, etc...

Floaty frenchness, enjoyed it

Decent french electro pop stuff. I'm still stuck on my last two albums, honestly.

3 Not bad

I didn't care for this much I'm afraid. I'm not sure it was bad I just generally didn't mind it in anyway. Ambivalence

oh a 90s french pop/dance album? This is exactly what I thought it would be. No more, and no less. Enjoyed my time! Don't need to go back.

The dang French at it again

Beautiful voice, good musical production, a different pop style and although not all the songs are excellent, it maintains a good balance.

Ew French (again)

When something is in a language I’m not strong in I try to focus on other aspects. I’ll listen for vibe in the music, overall flow or vocal emotion maybe for production quality. This record just didn’t hit it on any of those for me.

A well-picked French pop artist to help bridge the gap between Jacques Brel and Christine & the Queens. Riding the synthpop wave of Depeche Mode and New Order, Farmer channels an artistic presentation that delivers an album not dissimilar to Kate Bush's work. Was it pretty good? Yeah! Was it for me? Not really... CONTENDER FOR THE LIST: Only on the pretense that the list should expand on non-English language albums. Otherwise, no.

I liked L'Autre more than I expected to. It's not quite the same but there's something a little ethereal and gothic about it in a way that makes me think of Within Temptation, who as a rock band are obviously heavier and louder but there are some stylistic similarities in their foundations and the haunting female vocals. Agnus Dei and Regrets definitely feel like something they'd do in the first verse before breaking into a more theatrical rock sound, and largely the album appeals to me in that way, though the 90s pop stylings that keep getting in the way stop it really impressing me. I think it's a 3/5 for me because it gets close but not close enough to something really good.

nope

Pop francés. Aburrido. Un 2.

The background synth pop was v bland and uninspiring. Can't say much about thd breathy vocals as they were French. Dull.

I don't know what to say about this. I'm just going to steal another review. It's a combination of Enya and Madonna. And it didn't really vibe with me.

Being French, I obviously know who Mylène Farmer is, and I would lie if I said I can't enjoy her synth-pop hits sung with a ghostly, ethereal voice, often sprinkled with subliminal goth undertones and romantic literary influences. Even if I also have to admit I have enjoyed those hits in an admittedly very "guilty pleasure mode" up to now, ha ha. Just imagine a cheap mall / supermarket version of This Mortal Coil mixed with Eurodance and you're not so far off the mark! Mylène is also famous in France for her music videos, by the way, since her composer and producer, Laurent Boutonnat, is a filmmaker too. Boutonnat has obviously never recovered from the shock he experienced the first time he watched Stanley Kubrick's *Barry Lyndon*, and some of the most famous videos he shot for Mylène were thus 15 minutes - 20 minutes cinemascope period piece films with a lot of extras, stunts and all sorts of spectacular scenes that would normally not illustrate top 40 pop hits. Plus, they were very *saucy* films -- kinky stuff that was shown on the telly in hours where you didn't usually see things like that. Which probably left an imprint on the teenager with raging hormones that I was at the time, lol. All of this is very fun and nostalgic, but it would be a stretch to consider Mylène's albums aged like fine wine beyond their hit singles. The latter for *L'autre* are "Désenchantée" (probably her biggest song), "Je t'aime mélancolie" and "Regrets". Interesting tidbit about that particular tune, it's a beautiful duet with Jean-Louis Murat, who had quite a huge cred as an "authentic", near-indie representative of "chanson française" at the time this song was released. So in a sense, what we have here is our own version of "Where The Wild Roses Grow"... It was really as if the French equivalents of Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave were recording a song together (to the surprise of everyone). And this years before the two Aussie artists did that sort of thing themselves... Yet once again, this footnote can't possibly justify the inclusion of the album in the list for me. Because, as I suggested earlier, the rest of the tracklist comes off as quite hackneyed and/or awkward from today's vantage point. "Agnus Dei" is an interesting moody opener exploring Enigma or Enya turf, I guess (like some other openers found in Mylène's other albums). But then, you have incredibly shallow and clumsy so-called techno-dance tracks such as "Psychiatric" -- the very definition of the word "filler", also found in many of her other LPs (at least that I know of) -- to the point when the damage done to the flow and cohesion of said records is always hurt beyond repair. I'm not gonna bother mentioning the names of all those lame songs. They're instantly forgettable for me anyway. Besides, *L'autre* doesn't even harbor all of Mylène's hits. The most important of them (apart from "Désenchantée" and "Regrets") are to be found in previous LP *Ainsi Soit Je" (they're "Sans contrefaçon", "Pourvu qu'elles soient douces", and the title track). So I imagine a greatest hits / best of album covers everything you need to know about Farmer in 2024, if really you're curious about her. Anything else is overkill, really. I really, *really* tried to take this inclusion seriously and listen to this thing with fresh ears. Didn't work, though. Sometimes popular success in one country or another doesn't equate full artistic one. It was fun to see what will ultimately be a curio for most English-speaking users of this generator appear here, though. The world of music is really infinite, isn't it? 🙂 2/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums. 7/10 for more general purposes (5 + 2) Number of albums from the original list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 465 Albums from the original list I *might* include in mine later on: 288 Albums from the original list I won't include in mine: 336 ---- Number of albums from the users list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 29 Albums from the users list I *might* select for mine later on: 38 Albums from the users list I won't select for mine: 71 (including this one) --- Émile, j'ai mis ma dernière réponse sous l'album de The 1975 au dessus...

Don’t have much to say about this one. It was decent soft pop with a little bit of 90s electronic sound. It was also in French and I had no idea what was being said but the singer was pretty good. 2.5/10

A complete and utter waste of time. So boring I decided to get that root canal I've been putting off.

👎🏻

I can see this would be a trip down memory lane for some but it's pretty insipid really.

Perhaps it’s because I only speak 7th grade French, but I found this album middle school.

Nope