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While the 30-something chanteuse's reputation for giving the tabloids such outrageously good copy is well-documented, on her latest set of French sidewalk café songs of love and lust she proves - unlike Naomi, Tyra, Agyness Deyn and yes, Kate Moss - that she's one ex-supermodel who isn't just a singing budgie eager to extend her 15 minutes of fame.
When it comes to high profile romances, Mrs Nicolas Sarkozy's chronicle of how she became the First Lady of France hits the erotic jackpot. The title's a deceptively bewitching point of entry: "As If Nothing Had Happened"? Right, she only married the most powerful politician in Europe!
With 12 of the 14 songs sung in her native Gallic tongue, some conversational French is useful, but not essential. The cocktail of boudoir ballads and airy acoustic folk guitar pop breezes oozes more than enough sex appeal to ease you into the mood even if the only French in your pop phrasebook is "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi (ce soir)?"
Actually, make that oozes enough romance. Her languidly cool covers of Bob Dylan's "You Belong to Me" and Italian singer songwriter Francesco Guccini's "Il Vecchio e il Bambino" ("The Old Man and the Child") are playfully teasing love letters from a coy mistress to her man reminisicing about their initially 'scandalous' affair.
Whether she's straddling the double bass on slow blues ballad burner "Tu es ma came" ("You're My Drug") or shrugging off the brushed drum 'n brass thrusts of "Le Temps Perdu" ("Wasted Time") with a simple sigh, the chanteuse's lost art of seduction is Carla's sales pitch.
The intimate chamber pop arrangements provide the perfect foil for her coquettish cigar bar come-ons which shapeshift from a melancholic Francois Hardy croon on "Ma Jeunesse" to a feline Gainsbourg girl purr on a string kissed movie makeover of author Michel 'Atomised' Houellebecq's poem "La Possibilité d'une Île" ("The Possibility of an Island") that aficionados of the original Emmanuelle soft-core franchise will go gaga over.
