  cover art  Les Yeux Noirs   (World Village; US: 13 Dec 2005;
UK: Available as import)  Eric Slabiak, the violinist who, along
with his brother Olivier, founded Les Yeux Noirs, describes
their sixth album as a “good soup” made with “a lot of
ingredients ... Eastern European, Jewish, gypsy ... and rock
music”. The band takes elements of the different styles and
blends them together in melodic chunks. Their songs have the
luxurious, plastic sheen that French music sometimes commands, a
kind of polished intimacy that isn’t always present in the
source material. Where a more traditional gypsy group such as
Taraf de Haïdouks sound as if they could keep a tune going all
night if only their label and the length of a CD allowed it, the
tracks on tChorba reach their natural end in less than five
minutes. It’s a radio-friendly, audience-loving album.  Their
lyrics deal with love and regret, although I say this without
being able to understand the two songs sung in Romani, which are
not translated in the notes. Sometim