I find French bands endlessly fascinating, for reasons even I can’t fathom.

Perhaps it’s because I spent a lot of my youthful holidays there, listening with quiet bewilderment at the awful pop music on the radio, wondering when a Pulp song was going to appear (it never did).

And so the seed of an idea that French music is all pap was planted. It only occurred to me years later that if a French person came to the UK and listened to local radio stations here, they’d leave with exactly the same conclusions.

It turns out French pop – outside of the mainstream – is peppered with as many delightful curios as that of any other country. I once stumbled upon the Fete de Musique in Cahors, and wandered around in bliss as small bands of all genres played impromptu sets down tiny medieval streets.

Pendentif are the kind of French band that I find easy to love – warm and sunny, mainstream and angular, bright and sad.

Pendentif (the song) is an endlessly cheerful song that has been dipped in melancholy and left to dry in the hot Bordeaux sun. It’s a sly paean to love, lust and friends, wrapped around a cute and direct keyboard-stab. Songs don’t get much more universal than that.

The song Pendentif is from the EP Pendentif by Pendentif. Talk about eponymous. Hey – if you’re going to associate a song with you band’s name, you may as well make it a good one. Great stuff.

MORE: pendentif.bandcamp.com/track/pendentif

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