Nouvelle Vague

In some ways, I feel Nouvelle Vague is a band that was specially made just for me, being a cover lover, cinema & art, and French girls. Nouvelle Vague's been around for a few years now, and chances are, you've heard one of their cover songs. Their name means "new wave", and most of their cover songs are taken from 80s alternative rock.

Like Me First and the Gimme Gimmes who basically takes popular songs and convert it to punk rock, Vague takes classic songs and deconstruct it to 60s bossa nova.

When you hear a Nouvelle Vague song, you often don't realize it's a cover. That's because, according to legend, the two main musicians Marc Collin & Olivier Libaux gather various female singers from different countries that are often not familiar with the source material. Take for instance the Dead Kennedy's "Too Drunk to Fuck", a fast paced hardcore punk song with that unique elastic vocals, reduced to upright bass and acoustics and a very interesting heavy breathing and sexy French vocals. If you saw Planet Terror, you've heard this song!

While I believe that story about the singers never hearing the original songs, it's hard to believe it as they've covered some pretty well-known songs in their time: Buzzcocks' "Ever Fallen in Love", Billy Idol's "Dancing With Myself", New Order's "Blue Monday", Depeche Mode's "Just Can't Get Enough", The Undertones' "Teenage Kicks" - just to name a few.

Anyroad, the band is back together with a third album, appropriately titled 3 out June 16^th (Edit 6/16/09: I got several messages that this date is for the UK/Europe release only.  There is currently no information on a US-release date). I did try and request a copy for review, but as of this writing none were available. Some of the new covers that I'm most interesting in hearing is Depeche Mode's "Master & Servant", Violent Femmes' "Blister in the Sun" and The Go-Go's "Our Lips Are Sealed".

They are only doing four US this year, here are additional details for each US date:

JUNE 17 @ The Fillmore New York at Irving Plaza, NYC (Doors 8:00pm) JUNE 18 @ La Maison Française, Embassy of France- Washington, DC (Doors 8:30pm)
JUNE 19 @ Grand Ballroom @ The Regency Center, San Fran (Doors-7:00pm/ Show-8:00pm)
JUNE 20 @ The Music Box Theatre @ Fonda, Los Angeles at (Doors 8:00pm/Show 9:00pm)

I wish I could tell you more about 3, but from those four dates, I don't think US promotion is in their best interest at this moment. And judging from the rest of their tour schedule, it doesn't look like they're going to be back in the US anytime soon. Well, at least we still have their excellent self-titled debut and Band A Part album to listen to.