Sculpture Magazine

There is nothing more hip and French in the music scene that Nouvelle Vague.  With attractive female leads with breathless sweet voices and music that comes across as both sinister and innocent all in the same elevator ride through a punk, new wave cover universe, this, Nouvelle Vague's third album, is by far their best.

With the accompaniment of a handful of male leads, from Depeche Mode's Martin Gore to the Specials, Terry Hall, and even Ian McCulluch of Echo and the Bunnymen, the songs on NV3 have a bit more musical substance to them than the other two efforts.  Just a bit more though.  The main objective to this French Cover band, it seems, appears to be rooted more in cleverness than anything else.

This band takes a song like "Our Lips are Sealed" and inverts the sweetness of the Go Go's into a dark, walk through a stalker movie. Nice.  And on "God Save the Queen" the leisurely pace and naïve vocals only add to the impact of the song. 

For the most part, all the songs are working in a campy, French movie kind of way, as if, as in those movies, you don't know whether to like the characterizations or loathe them.  You also leave the album with the same sort of existential indifference that many a French movie invokes.  I only loathed one track - "Blister in the Sun".  The band tackled the wrong song here.   The singer's lack of lyrical clarity ruins the affect and it comes across plain and typical.  (They would have done better with a Violent Femmes lyric like "Hey Dad, give me the car keys…")  And while the band stated this album was inspired by American Country Music, yikes.  I can see Nashville from my house (It's about 200 miles away) and there is nary a twang one on this album.  Even on their almost as wrong Talking Heads cover, "Road to Nowhere" it's interpreted more as a bouncy, breezy tune than country.

All in all though, if you have a need for artsy, electronic covers of old new wave (English for "Nouvelle Vague") then NV3 might be worth listening to, but for me the initial shock of such clever interpretations of old new wave songs, wore off pretty fast. 

Track List

01. Master and Servant

02. Blister in the Sun        

03. Road to Nowhere      

04. All My Colours

05. American       

06. Heaven           

07. Parade

08. Metal              

09. Ca Plane Pour Moi     

10. Our Lips Are Sealed        

11. God Save the Queen              

12. Say Hello Wave Goodbye     

13. So Lonely     

14. Marooned