E-Mail This Article to a Friend New-wavering Nouvelle Vague just can’t get enough BY FRANKLIN SOULTS
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The multi-artist collection Nouvelle Vague (Luaka Bop/V2) is the best high-concept album I’ve heard since Danger Mouse’s Grey Album. Like that 2004 pirate mash-up of the Beatles’ "White Album" and Jay Z’s Black Album, Nouvelle Vague sums up its concept in its two-word album title. As it turns out, this classic description of 1960s vanguard French cinema means not only "new wave" but, also in Brazilian Portuguese, "bossa nova." Put it all together and — voilà! — you’ve got the concept: two French composers overseeing six sultry international chanteuses singing bossa nova cover versions of new-wave classics, mostly from the first post-punk era (1978–1981), a period that bands from the Faint to the Fever to Franz Ferdinand have already made à la mode sur tout le monde (sorry, it’s infectious).

Of course, the higher a concept goes, the more likely it is to suffer the dizzying and potentially disastrous effects of irony poisoning. Over the phone from Paris, producer/keyboardist Marc Collins, the project’s mastermind, acknowledges the hazards of making punk anomie sound like yuppie bonhomie while almost tumbling over the contradiction himself. "I know that there is a thin line between horrible things, because we just take all the sadness, all the melancholy of, for example, [Joy Division singer] Ian Curtis, and we just transform it, bring it into the sun, with you know a cocktail party, barbecue, and it’s very strange to do this."

But then, he continues, "There’s this problem, this confusion with bossa nova. Because for most of the people today, bossa nova is the music that you can hear in the lift, in the hotel, or whatever. But bossa nova is not made for this! It was a very new music and almost rebel music when people like João Gilberto recorded in the early ’60s in Brazil. It’s not lounge music at all. So for me to do bossa nova and new wave, it’s not for doing something for people in cocktail parties."

So which is it, with or without the olive? Actually, Nouvelle Vague works because it’s both. Collins seems to have conceived it that way too, adding cocktail-party sounds to several cuts and on the cover that inspired the project the sounds of waves gently crashing and seagulls softly cawing. "One day I just had this idea to imagine a girl on the beach in Rio and just singing ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ with the sun and the guitar. And I just have this feeling that it can be very beautiful. I can’t explain why. It’s not so intellectual, you know. It’s just . . . like a dream."

Brazilian singer Eloisa’s phonetically challenged rendition of the wrenching Joy Division classic opens the disc, and that sets the tone for everything from her charmingly simple rendition of Depeche Mode’s synth-pop powerhouse "Just Can’t Get Enough" to French pop star Camille’s lilting delivery of XTC’s herky-jerk standard "Making Plans for Nigel." Like most pleasant dreams, these bossa nova interpretations are æthereal, slight, beguiling, oddly memorable, more than a little silly, and you know, not so intellectual. Which isn’t to say they’re not smart. To their delight, the 37-year-old Collins and his partner Olivier Libaux found that most of the singers had never heard the originals, and they kept it that way. Which may explain why some renditions add unexpected layers to classics, like PiL’s "This Is Not a Love Song" and the Dead Kennedys’ "Too Drunk To Fuck." The latter swings the way the original rocked, and the wonderful Camille runs away with the vocal, twirling role-reversal ideas around Jello Biafra’s one-note machismo like a strand of hair around her finger.

Slight as this disc is, these moments do more than just tenderize history. At the recent EMP Pop Conference in Seattle, critic Will Hermes played a slice of Nouvelle Vague in his examination of the new "unplugged" market, a demographic he characterized as going too gently into the good night with its Starbucks-ification of pop’s past. But you could also see these organic mash-ups as the gentlest of critiques to the noisy Fever/Faint/Franz Ferdinand present. Says Collins, "It seems the public, they just want to listen to something that they already know. They didn’t listen to Gang of Four, so they listen to Franz Ferdinand now. I prefer to do Nouvelle Vague than to do something with the same sound as, I don’t know, Blondie or Sisters of Mercy, or all the bands from the ’80s. Because I think that my point of view on the ’80s is maybe more interesting, is different, is a bit new."