Description
‘This Is Not A Best Of’ is – in fact! – a brilliant best of compilation from Nouvelle Vague. Over three studio albums from 2004 to 2009, Marc Collin and Marina Celeste rendered post-punk songs from the Seventies and Eighties in a loungey, bossa-nova style. This collection gathers the highlights from those records – including takes on Joy Division, The Undertones, The Clash, The Cure and Depeche Mode etc.
Only a frisky samba romp through Depeche Mode’s Just Can’t Get Enough flirts with kitsch (& who doesn’t love a little kitsch?). Elsewhere, familiar lyrics and arrangements are turned inside out to generate frosty menace (The Clash’s Guns of Brixton), giggly coquetry (Too Drunk To Fuck by the Dead Kennedys) or haunting langour (The Cure’s A Forest, teeming with birdsong).
Record geeks will delight in the in-jokes and unlikely juxtapositions, but this inspired collection’s most potent songs, notably a heartrending reading of Tuxedomoon’s cult gem In a Manner of Speaking, require no explanation.
