CD review: Nouvelle Vague's '3'

NOUVELLE VAGUE

"3"

Kindred spirits: Ivy, Stereolab, Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine

Show: With Clare and the Reasons on Saturday at the 9:30 club. Doors open at 8. 202-265-0930. http://www.930.com.

Parisian music producers Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux, the men behind Nouvelle Vague, have a new gimmick. Actually, it's more like a sub-gimmick.

The group still does Franco-Brazilian lounge arrangements of new wave tunes, replacing punky clamor with acoustic guitar and gentle syncopation. But on the group's new CD, "3," the twist is that four of the tracks are duets between Nouvelle Vague's sultry female vocalists and each song's original singer.

Hearing Martin Gore on Depeche Mode's "Master and Servant" or Ian McCulloch on Echo & the Bunnymen's "All My Colors" is mildly surprising. But that's mostly because Nouvelle Vague (French for both "new wave" and "bossa nova") customarily forgoes male voices; any stray tenor or baritone would provide an earthy contrast to the cooing of Melanie Pain, Marina Celeste and Nadeah Miranda.

There are some major readjustments, including a reggae version of Plastic Bertrand's "Ca Plane Pour Moi" (one of the few 1970s punk French-language hits) and a folkie rendition of the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen." Yet most of these covers aren't tugged far out of their element; such midtempo ballads as "Our Lips Are Sealed" (here featuring Fun Boy Three singer Terry Hall) and the Psychedelic Furs' "Heaven" were always more serene than surly. Nouvelle Vague's interpretations are stylish and pretty, but not especially novel.

-- Mark Jenkins