duggup

Artist: Nouvelle Vague
Website: www.myspace.com/nouvellevague or Nouvelle Vague
Track Name: Blue Monday
Playback: flash
Download?: No

It’s Monday, so this is a perfect day to present Nouvelle Vague doing their awesome cover of Blue Monday featuring Mélanie Pain as vocalist. This is so wonderful, it totally side-swiped me. Which when I think about it, so did New Order when they played the original.

“Nouvelle Vague” is a French project initialized by Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux. “Nouvelle Vague” (means “New Wave” in French and “Bossa Nova” in Portuguese) revisits a number of both Marc and Olivier’s favourite tracks of the early eighties, from Joy Division to XTC. Their idea was to forget the initial punk or new wave background of each song, keep simple fundamental chords, work with young singers who never heard the original versions,and make the quality of original song writing happen in a completely different way.(bossa nova,jazz style and sixties pop)

Surprisingly it works.

Here is some hype from their site…

Nouvelle Vague presents New Wave features some of the great names of the 80’s – Visage, OMD, The Stranglers, Joy Division, Gary Numan rendering their versions of classic tracks by The Rolling Stones, Bowie, The Kinks, The Velvet Underground, The Doors and others. Alongside these are more obscure bands – Belgium’s Polyphonic Size, Antena from France, The Comateens from New York. Perhaps most representative of the spirit of the new wave movement as a whole and this album in particular is Belgium’s Elton Motello deviant cover of Plastique Bertrand’s international hit, Ça plane pour moi. Or was it the original … ?

Here is the band performing “Relax”…

Mélanie Pain has finished working on her first album, a combination of French romantic pop songs meets Americana. She is playing in Melbourne in July.

Thanks to tartanpodcasts Mellow Monday for the heads up.

UPDATE: 18/11/2007

Just found a wonderful version of Echo & The Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon” over at Last.FM.
It’s available as a free download