Nouvelle Vague

Bande A Part (LP)

Album Details

In 2004 Nouvelle Vague’s eponymous debut introduced French duo Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux’s singular take on post punk nuggets by the likes of Joy Division, Depeche Mode, Tuxedo Moon and the Undertones, recasting them as svelte, sophisticated bossa nova-inflected chansons, given wing by a succession of breathy-voiced guest Left Bank chanteuses. A hit album all over Europe and beyond (more than 200,000 copies sold, concerts in over twenty countries, several tracks given virtual ubiquity courtesy of seriously smitten TV advertisers), Nouvelle Vague spent much of the ensuing year touring in support. On stage, singers Melanie Pain, Camille and Phoebe Killdeer helped flesh out sets with songs not on the album, like Buzzcocks’ Ever Fallen In Love, New Order’s Blue Monday and the Sound’s I Can’t Escape Myself, proving that Nouvelle Vague was no novelty one-off, but rather a vibrant springboard for further reassessment of the darker musical ‘80s.

Those songs, along with eleven other mesmerising reinterpretations, now grace Bande à Part, Novelle Vague’s second album; the next chapter in their beguiling, retro-futurist odyssey. While Marc Collin’s original conception for the band was based on a fantasy of “a young Brazilian girl singing Love Will Tear Us Apart on a Rio beach in the ‘60s”, this time he envisioned, “a young Jamaican with his acoustic guitar singing Heart Of Glass in his Kingston township suburb”

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 movie Bande à Part - after which the album is named - is one of the often obtuse director’s most accessible films, in which characters mix fatalism and starry-eyed naïveté to playful, joyous effect. An album can rarely have been so well-named.