Mixin' with Nouvelle Vague

The Nouvelle Vague project — French producers Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux arranging post-punk and new wave songs for female vocalists in a bossa nova idiom — sounds like a novelty concept on paper. It is not a novelty. The records are genuinely interesting and the best of the arrangements reveal something in the source material that the original recordings didn't have access to.

This is what a great cover does. It doesn't replace the original — the original remains itself — but it opens a different angle on the song, shows you a room in the house you didn't know was there.

What Nouvelle Vague does with the songs

The source material is post-punk and new wave: Joy Division, The Clash, The Cure, Dead Kennedys, Gang of Four, Bauhaus. Songs made in a register of urgency and anxiety and sometimes anger. Songs that had arrangements built around the specific energies of those emotional states.

Collin and Libaux strip all of that away and replace it with bossa nova — the Brazilian form that has its own emotional register, which is something like melancholy worn lightly, sadness that is also pleasurable, loss held with grace.

The result is songs that carry both sets of meaning at once. "Love Will Tear Us Apart" becomes a different kind of heartbreaking in the bossa nova arrangement. "Guns of Brixton" becomes something you can dance to without losing the edge. "Too Drunk to Fuck" becomes a comedy that it wasn't in the original, which says something about how much emotional register depends on the musical setting.

The Americana connection

The Nouvelle Vague project might seem distant from the Americana and folk-roots music this site covers. The connection is through the tradition of rearrangement and reinterpretation that sits at the center of American folk music.

The folk revival's central activity was taking songs from one context and performing them in another. The act of reinterpretation was itself the argument: that the song was strong enough, that the form could carry different content, that music was not fixed to its original moment.

Nouvelle Vague makes the same argument from a different position. Post-punk songs are strong enough. The bossa nova form can carry them. The songs are not fixed to their original moment.

The mixtape

The Mixin' entries at this site are part mixtape, part conversation about the music. The Nouvelle Vague selection runs through:

• "In a Manner of Speaking" — the Tuxedomoon cover, the most folk-adjacent thing in the catalog
• "Love Will Tear Us Apart" — unavoidable and definitive
• "Too Drunk to Fuck" — the comedy version, which is also the most revealing version
• "Guns of Brixton" — stripped and reconstructed
• "A Forest" — The Cure in bossa, which creates a specific kind of atmospheric strangeness

See all Mixtapes.