Recommended: Gotan Project, Lunatico

I can’t be the only one with a fetish for a bit of franco-gypsy accordion, especially when it’s used to adorn the fringes of a dance song. After all, how many people bought Grace Jones’ classic Nightclubbing for the track ‘I’ve Seen That Face Before”? If you’re a closet dance accordion fan too, you’ll dig the Gotan Project’s ‘Lunatico’, which I found on Word UK magazine’s monthly sampler, but which is also available now on iTunes. Read the reviews in Word and the album’s an atttempt to update the classic genre of tango music, originating in the latin world, and certainly most of the song titles are latin, but mostly it sounds French to me. Many of the songs have just a soupçon of accordion, and all are redolent of Paris in the early hours of the morning, after a night spent in the headlong pursuit of, well, hedonism. There’s up-tempo dancefloor numbers and more than a few of the slow, piano-and-bass-driven late night jazz types in-between. Highlight of the latter being ‘Celos’ and of the former, ‘Criminal’. But the highlight of the album is surely ‘Diferente’, a modern-day interpretation of Jones’ classic ‘I’ve Seen That Face Before.’ If I were Jones I’d be telling my publicist to get on the phone, because if Gotan Project goes Top 10, she’s going to be back in the limelight. For all the right reasons - ‘Nightclubbing’ is a timeless classic too.