rench music occupies an odd place in the Anglophone pop consciousness. The best-known modern acts—Autour de Lucie, Air, Bertrand Burgulat, et ses camarades—are quirky and sophisticated, seemingly preoccupied with mixing both French and English and digital with analog. English-speaking music geeks can't seem to get enough of that sort of thing.

But on the far side of this candy-coloured electric bossa nova is a somewhat different nouvelle vague (new wave) of French music. Turning a blind eye to the sleek allure of, well, the last forty or so years of music history, musicians like Françoiz Breut, Dominque A, Coralie Clément, and Benjamin Biolay seem to prefer the pop-chanson of Françoise Hardy and early Serge Gainsbourg (not to mention the classical chanson of Jacques Brel and Charles Aznavour).

Having sold a staggering 380,000 copies of his self-titled 2002 debut, Vincent Delerm makes the latest entry in this hushed-candle-lit-Gallic-splendour canon with Kensington Square. Despite being named after a neighbourhood in London and name-checking American indie rockers ("Veruca Salt et Frank Black"), the album has its feet planted firmly on French soil. Delicate strings? Check. Unobtrusive horns? Check. Piano straight out of a smoky Parisian nightclub circa 1957? But of course. And the wit and black humour inherent in Delerm's lyrics are evident even to those of us whose understanding of the French language is...imperfect. (Cough.)

Of course, most things in this world are imperfect, and this album is certainly one of them. Delerm is undoubtedly an accomplished musician, but unless the listener is suitably depressed, the somber atmosphere of Kensington Square starts to wear on the ears after a time. Unfortunately, it suffers from the same Achilles heel as its counterparts in the modern chanson sweepstakes: a lack of sonic variety. The songs tend to melt into one another, the instrumentation is almost always the same, and the tempo drags reluctantly from track to track. Would it have hurt to bring in more extra instruments like the harpsichord heard on "Les Filles de 1973 ont Trente Ans"? At least fellow nouvelle-vaguer Keren Ann joins in twice to break the monotony. On "Deutsche Grammophon" and the brief but brilliant "Veruca Salt et Frank Black" (along with Dominque A), her vocals make both songs considerably more interesting and offer a pleasant counterpoint to Delerm's hushed, half-spoken tones.

Is it a worthwhile album, then? Worthwhile, yes, but specific. It seems clear that Delerm created these songs for the drunk, the bitter, and the lonely—people who are operating in other modes are better off ingesting in small doses. In fact, it’s probably best heard, as Sebastien Tellier put it: "alone and by candlelight".