One good thing about writing about music is that fair pretty much leaves us alone. We at Pitchfork can tell you just about anything with impunity. Sure, if we reported that Bette Midler had been discovered unconscious and tangled up in a leather harness in the basement of a seedy Budapest nightclub, we might get in trouble. But we could tell you that the latest 311 album was the album of the year, and face no repercussions. There's just not a whole lot of watch- dogging going on as far as the music media is concerned. Really, nobody should be able to get away with using the phrase "the American Radiohead" in every other review. But we do.

Maybe the music media's worst offense, though, is its abuse of the word "diva." A diva is "an operatic primadonna," according to my dictionary. Divas are theatrical, grandiose, and imposing, and they sing in Italian. Maria Callas was a diva. Brandy is not. Neither are Whitney, Babs or Bette, with or without that Hungarian leather harness. Similarly, none of them are chanteuses. Being female is just not enough to qualify somebody as a chanteuse. A chanteuse is a nightclub singer; there are all kinds of poorly lit, back- alley aspects to chanteuse that most singers don't come close to. And it's worth pointing out that chanteuse is a French word, not an English word. Or, for that matter, a Yiddish word.

Ah, but Françoiz Breut sings in French. Lord, does she ever. Songs of unrequited love, forbidden passion, anonymous debauchery, despair, disaffection, occult rites and their untold consequences, disastrous falls from grace, bestiality, clandestine meetings, unknowable binges and unthinkable purges. Of course, I don't speak French; all that's conjecture. But I can't imagine these songs being about the wind beneath anybody's wings. And if she's saying the boy is hers, I'm sure there are a lot of veiled threats and spilled bodily fluids involved.

Beneath all that craziness is partner Dominic Ané's music. With his reverb- drenched, organic sound, Ané makes his peers sound stiff and robotic, like the animatronic characters at one of those theme pizza places. It's more Nick Cave than Portishead, but it's vibey as hell, with a narrow cobbled alley ambience to go with Breut's vocals. These songs are stark, and they have a weird carnival sensibility: they could be the soundtrack to a film co-directed by David Lynch and Wim Wenders-- maybe if they remade "Santa Sangre" and filmed the whole thing in Super 8.

She may not quite be a diva, but it's not a stretch to call Françoiz Breut a chanteuse. And in a world of plain old female singers, you'd do well to discover the difference.

-Zach Hooker