Beam is a vehicle for the lovely songs and voice of Helene Renaut. She's very French, but has been living in the San Francisco area for a while. She possesses a sweet, lilting voice that has the habit of staying within arm's reach of pitch, which is quite unique for a French female pop singer. The songs she has written for this debut record are pastoral beauties that call to mind Donovan, early Joni Mitchell, Hope Sandoval, Ladybug Transistor, and their family of bands, fellow French poppers like Ivy, and another great San Francisco area band Call and Response, whose drummer, Jordan Dalrymple, plays drums, piano, and slide guitar, and provides backup vocals for Beam. Only a couple of the songs are in French; the rest are in cutely accented English, with the gentle "California Cradled You," the dreamy "Les Anges n'ont pas d'Ailes," and the sweeping "You Rock Me Once" being highlights. The rest of the band, despite looking like the house band at your local "exotic" coffeehouse, provides sympathetic and very restrained backing for Renaut's songs. So it often occurs that a misplaced loud guitar riff, or Jaco-fied bassline, ends up fracturing the delicate mood of a record like this. But the boys in the band have masterfully avoided such tragedies. Guesting on the record are the Moore Brothers, who provide wonderful background vocals on two tracks. Beam's debut is a lo-fi, low impact, gem of a record that shouldn't be ignored by fans of French pop done right, and indie pop done nicely.