And Now For Something Vaguely Different
So lately I’ve been getting into this band called Nouvelle Vague. Their name is of course French for “vaguely new” which fits because what they do is covers of older songs.
Their music has kind of a bossa nova feel to it. For those who don’t know “bossa nova” is Porteu… Portugu… Spanish for “the person in charge of the exploding stars” which I guess also kind of makes sense because the band is actually a couple of guys arranging music for a bunch of different female singers or as they are called in French “chartreuses“. Since some of these singers have gone on to have some pretty decent solo careers the whole thing kind of fits.
Anyway I first found out about Nouvelle Vague from their version of Modern English’s seminal Burger King commercial “I Melt With You.” This is a sentimental and nostalgic song which is deceptively complex in that despite only having like fifteen or sixteen lines of actual lyrics nobody knows all of them including Modern English who end up just kind humming along near the end.
After falling in love with the Nouvelle Vague version of the song I got a copy of the album its on. It kind of reminds me of that album called Strange Little Girls that Tori did a few years back where she reinterpreted all those older songs. I mean the music is like a whole different style obviously but just the way you can hear a song a million times and then you hear somebody else singing it differently and it’s like “Oh wow I never thought of it that way before.”
Like how probably a lot of people never thought that singing a song about enlisting your infant daughter in the murder of her mother was creepy and weird until Tori took Eminem’s song about that and sung it all creepy and weird, you know?
That’s what Nouvelle Vague is like.
Only not.
~Ariella Rasputin Wallflower
December 30th, 2007 at 7:34 am
*falls over laughing*…
If you don’t know why i’m laughing, Ari, you should ask Lexy