Nouvelle Vague: Bande à Part

CML call number: CD/POP/Nouvelle
Sasha Frere-Jones wrote in the New Yorker: "For almost a decade, musicians have been borrowing things from the nineteen-eighties. … But, until now, acts haven't borrowed that many songs. In 2004, a French band called Nouvelle Vague — the producers Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux — released a self-titled album of eighties hits performed by singers whose first language was not English, and who had never heard the songs they were assigned to sing. The results were diverting within a narrow stylistic range; the songs, whether originally by Depeche Mode or the Buzzcocks, became frisky bossa novas. For their wonderful second album, 'Bande à Part' (Luaka Bop), the aesthetic has been widened beyond Brazilian sounds, though the arrangements remain acoustic. When the Cramps released 'Human Fly,' in 1979, it was a campy sci-fi joke rendered as fuzzy garage rock. Nouvelle Vague turn the song into slinky cabaret. The singer coos as she sings 'buzz buzz' and 'I'm an unzipped fly,' a bit like Marilyn Monroe, but without the pose of innocence, and backed by the band from Tom Waits's 'Rain Dogs'" ("Pop Notes," 9/4/o6).