I became disenchanted with the French language around fifth grade. My stylish twentysomething American of a language teacher, Ms. Kasten, visited our class once a week. As some kind of sick warm-up before the actual "learning" started, we were made to form a line at the room's perimeter, and dance conga-style while chanting, "Comment t'appels tu?" The exercise, which exploited French's potential fruitiness, was also a sign of how difficult it is to make children remember anything when you only see them for 40 minutes a week. Poor Mademoiselle. Repetition may have been the key to our understanding one particular phrase, but it certainly never won any hearts. After only a class or two, she had a room full of nonbelievers.

And the interest was never ignited, through high school and college (while attending both, I studied the remarkably more familiar Spanish). I've regarded the small amount of French pop culture that has filtered into America with a kitschy eye twinkle and an ironic half-smile. As for my contact with the language itself, each time I hear it, Kasten's face appears and I find myself in the teacher/student communication paradigm of Charlie Brown cartoons; only instead of hearing a blatting "wuh-wah-wah," it sounds more like a sleepy "oui oui."

So essentially, the prospect of listening to an album by a youngish, pouty French babe who isn't known for her cheesecake tendencies, was a disconcerting one. And indeed Françoiz Breut's second LP (available domestically, at least), Vingt à Trente Mille Jours, opens with the outright brooding "Derriére Le Grand Filtre." Breut enters the scene urgently pissed off, eagerly spouting half-spoken French nothings before a backdrop of a relentlessly fluttering electric guitar eclipses its more tempered acoustic, rhythmic counterpart. She's utterly desperate in "L'affaire D'un Jour," which sports punctuated guitar riffs that come close to crashing into her, but prove too restrained. It's not until the record's fourth track, the folky, arpeggio-laden "Portsmouth," that Breut's technical and emotive ability are realized; she twists the ends of her breathy conversational tone with trills of gorgeous melody. It's an approach that rewards as quickly as it surprises.

The less maudlin tunes suit Breut even better. She's coy and stunning on "Il N'y a Pas D'Hommes Dans Les Coulisses," which features slinking drums and Southwestern flavored guitar. On the upbeat lo-fi rock of both "L'Origine du Monde" and the record's title track, you can almost hear her smiling through the songs' dulcet melodies. Breut's boyfriend/songwriter, Dominique Ane, deserves a nod himself for keeping the songs sweet but never cloying, as well as his occasionally dense arrangements that never clutter or interfere with Breut's singing.

It's true: Françoiz won me over despite the odds. Now, when I lay in bed, lulled by her sexy purr, I sometimes call out for my first French teacher: "Why, Ms. Kasten? Why didn't I pay more attention in class?" And while the tears soak my ears and back of my neck, Françoiz takes over and we do our own two-person congo.

-Richard M. Juzwiak