Nouvelle Vague’s sophomore album, “A Bande Apart,” begins with a cover of “The Killing Moon.” It’s an appropriate lead to an album of covers this way because Nouvelle Vague is the killing moon: to reinvent the songs they cover as their own, there is a death of the original involved. But there’s also rebirth. The next song, “Ever Fallen in Love?” lets the listened fall in love with the whispy chantuse style of vocals, the samba beat, and a song that teeters somewhere in between mellow background music and get up and dance foreground music.
Marc Collins, the impetus behind Nouvelle Vague, says on their web page, “Just as on the first album I'd imagined a young Brazilian girl singing Love Will Tear Us Apart on a Rio beach in the '60s, this time I envisaged a young Jamaican with his acoustic guitar singing Heart Of Glass in his Kingston township suburb.” The difference between the two albums is audible and the conception he describes here is something that the band actually sticks with. Their rendition of Blondie’s hit “Heart of Glass” is one of the best songs on the album. The reggae beat feels so natural it makes you wonder why Blondie didn’t think of it in the first place. It’s hard to reinvent such an iconic song, almost as hard as killing the moon, but Nouvelle Vague succeeds on both counts.
The album takes a darker turn with “Bella Lugosi’s Dead” and “Shack Up,” but perhaps this just reflects the darker side of life in the Caribbean (or perhaps I’m reading too much into it). All these songs work because they still fit within the original conception.
The only song that really doesn’t work is their cover of U2’s “In the Name of Love.” A noble effort, NV just tried too hard and reached too far. The result sounds like a church choir doing Bono. Which just shouldn’t happen.
Other than “In the Name Of Love,” there aren’t any other tracks you’ll have to skip on “A Bande Apart.” On this album the band sets themselves apart from another novelty one hit wonder. They shoot for the moon and they succeed. |