When the release of Carla Bruni’s new album, Comme si de rien n’était (As if Nothing Happened) was announced in May, we were told that 95% of the material was written before the model and singer met - and, of course, subsequently married - the president of France. How coy, how tantalising, that 5% seems. Where, among the album’s 14 tracks, does it lurk? Which of Bruni’s breathy musings contain references to Nicolas Sarkozy?

If the brute statistic is to be believed, Bruni’s album is a window on her soul as it was shortly before she made eyes across a dinner-party table at her diminutive suitor. In this scenario, Ma Jeunesse’s (translated) reflection, “My youth looks at me harshly, it tells me, ‘It’s time to go’”, might be her farewell to wilder days with the likes of Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, and an unconscious anticipation of the coup de foudre that would occur when she came face to face with the president. Yet the numerical bulk of that 95%, its bossy absolutism, comes across as too pat, too convenient. When Bruni sings, on Tu es ma came, of a lover “deadlier than Afghan heroin, more dangerous than Colombian white”, or, on Le Temps perdu, mews, “I’m offering you the time of cherries and roses / The time of silky caresses”, is that post-Sarko or pre?

The head of state will want to reassure himself that it is the former. What torment, though, if, as he stands beside her in his stacked heels, she in her now regulation flats, his mind is a tumult of percentage anxiety. Will he look across, or up, at the woman once described by a love rival as “a praying mantis” and wonder just who else she made promises to about “Le temps des cerises”?

Should Sarkozy need calming down, he could do worse than sit back and listen to the album’s musical and vocal content. For it’s a strangely becalmed affair, and narcosis threatens almost throughout. Rarely does Bruni sound anything other than disinterested: she is all froideur and no frisson, an impression reinforced by a sonic palette that maxes on desiccated jazz and acoustica, with dashes of Beatles-like pop, and ends up sounding like a mobile-phone ad on loop: the combination of strummed guitar, upright bass and brushed drums conjures up not so much a praying mantis as a woman with too many Jack Johnson, Sting and Norah Jones CDs in her collection.

Eleven of the songs feature Bruni’s own lyrics, and, just occasionally, she stirs herself to relish their sly wordplay and rat-a-tat-tat prolixity, or deliver a vocal that is a notch more enlivened than a sigh. L’Amoureuse, with its sprightly bossa nova, L’Antilope (whose cryptic, Eric Cantona-like “Me, I’m at one with the present / Like the panther and the elephant” is a bit of a poser) and the lovely Je suis une enfant, which samples Schumann, all find Bruni sounding stirred, if not quite shaken. Mostly, though, this album is a cross between efficient pastiche and postcoitally dissatisfied pop: you can almost hear the snap of the cigarette lighter and sense the air of vague regret. Her arrangement of an extract from Michel Houellebecq’s La Possibilité d’une île may not be as drop-dead ghastly as what she did to Yeats’s Those Dancing Days Are Gone on her second album, No Promises, but its soft-porn-flick music is still bracingly odd.

Will Sarkozy feel proud of his wife’s record? Or will those percentages, and the album’s air of listlessness and boredom - some of which must have been committed to tape after the couple met - gnaw away inside his head?

As if it never happened, goes the title. No man, not even a president, will be reassured by a statement like that.

Comme si de rien n’était is released tomorrow on Dramatico - but you can listen to it now, at www.timesonline.co.uk/carlabruni

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of 2009
• The 100 Worst Movies of 2009
• The 100 Best Films of the Decade