A Subtly Withering, Cynical New Album From Office Culture

Over the past few years, Office Culture frontman and keyboardist Winston Cook-Wilson has built a career as a musical counterpart to Neil LaBute. Over a backdrop of snarky (some would say ineffably cheesy) fusion jazz-pop, Cook-Wilson’s anti-heroes and anti-heroines do offhandedly horrible things to each other…because they can. Love songs for the screen-obsessed never sounded so casually cruel in this band’s crisply efficient hands. Their previous release A Life of Crime made the top thirty albums of 2020 list here; their latest, Big Time Things is streaming at Bandcamp.

It’s not as corrosive as the last one, but a close listen rewards the listener with big tells: this music is infinitely more subversive than it might seem from its plasticky surface. Cook-Wilson’s character studies often bring to mind Ward White‘s ominously allusive narratives. The album opens with Suddenly, a study in Aja-era Steely Dan funk-lite with an unexpectedly bracing bit of bagpipey orchestration from violinist Ben Russell and cellist Kristen Drymala. Does the user meet karmic blowback? “What will I find at the end of my big mistake, something suddenly changed?”

Bassist Charlie Kaplan and drummer Pat Kelly give the album’s title track a cold quasi-strut, harmony singer Caitlin Pasko adding a layer of Julee Cruise icy-hot as Cook-Wilson channels a similar ruthless cynicism, “Wondering if it’s you I should try.”

Guitarist Ian Wayne provides lingering, trebly accents over spare, blippy electric piano and increasingly lush strings in the third track, Timing. “The underdog should have won, did you hope you’d be treated the same?” Cook-Wilson asks. “Bodies stacked in the hall, so they heard every call, freedom fighters never went there at all.” A reference to plandemic-era remdesivir murders, death on a more global scale, or just a metaphor for interpersonal dynamics informed by a “kangaroo court” conscience? All of the above?

“Turtles all the way down, things were bad, but they’re better now,” Cook-Wilson intones over a light-footed trip-hop groove in Things Were Bad: over the last couple of years, he’s learned how to hit the high notes with his reedy falsetto. “I don’t need things to fall in line, I never knew where the line was,” he admits in the album’s fifth track, Line.

“We stuff crumbled receipts in cracks in the walls, so somebody would know we were here at all,” the narrator muses over deadpan DX7 electric piano pop in Elegance. Somehow the “I only want you to be happy” mantra amid the wafting strings is a little much.

The satire shifts from lyrical to musical in Little Reminders: what happens on the chorus is obvious but irresistibly funny all the same. And yet, Cook-Wilson can’t resist dropping the veil for some genuine poignancy in a shivery string arrangement

Likewise, the gentle funkdaddy bass, plush backing vocals and slow faux-funk of A Word are dead giveaways

Tell me in a few words
Show me it’s the thought that counts
Get some new eyes on this production, blow the crowd away…
I hauled that junk out of the yard on slow decay 
I skipped four lanes, veered back into traffic
With the sky beamed red in flames 

Cook-Wilson reaches toward a soul-gospel electric piano vibe in the final cut, Rules: “Nothing gets past me ’cause no one treads soft enough,” he reminds. This is one mean record.

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Mark Crispin Miller: The Best News and Music Source on Substack

Mark Crispin Miller publishes News From Underground, the best daily feed on the web. But in the past two years, his Substack has become as good a source for music, and protest songs in particular, as it is for what’s happening in the world. And as it turns out, the author of books like the hilarious Bush Dyslexicon and the scathing 2004 election fraud expose Fooled Again is also an excellent songwriter! He’s only posted one of his own so far. Queen of the Forest is a catchy, upbeat folk-rock tune in a Richard Thompson vein, with Topher Sisson leading the band: “Smile as you approach the pass.” Sage Hana did one of her usual awesome video mashups with it.

Miller is unsurpassed as a source for protest songs. Here’s Drop D’s Hotel Paranoia, set to the tune of the national anthem of busking (click and scroll down a bit):

Then they brought out the needles, and they boosted away
There were voices in the monitor and I heard them say
“Welcome to the Hotel Paranoia
Such an ugly place
So just mask your face”
Plenty of doom at the Hotel Paranoia
Any kind of fear, you can find it here

To set up the next video, this Steve Kirsch meme explains that “When you start seeing ads like this one, we’ll finally be able to trust the CDC. Until then, not so much.”

Among other great Miller finds are the best Pfizer ad ever, along with a vintage concert video of choral ensemble Oak Ash & Thorn singing the Anacreontic Song at Berkeley’s Freight and Salvage in the early 1980s (as sleuthed out in the comments to this rendition). You might recognize the melody of this popular drinking song from the turn of the 19th century.

Bryan E. Miller’s version of The Star-Spangled Banner playing over the closing credits of 2000 Mules makes a perfect segue: it’s better than Hendrix. Fast forward to 1:25:50 – or, better yet, watch the whole movie. It’s pretty lo-budget and drags in places, but the evidence is damning.

Let’s wind this up with a mix of memes, a ridiculously funny rap hit, a video that will age well and one that definitely won’t.

Is the Goliath character Mr. Magoo addicted to pills? This clip is from season 4 of the series, via the irreplaceable Dr. Jessica Rose. 

Rapper Bryson Gray is back with his latest hilarious joint, HunterBidenHacked: “You wanna know what’s really wild, when your own son calls you a pedophile.”

While it’s still hot, here’s Denise Welch’s viral “IT’S CALLED SUMMER” meme for the “climate change” psy-op.

Here’s another good one, artist Anne Gibbons on the panic du jour.

Mathew Aldred, who publishes another must-read Substack news feed, found this even funnier, spot-on Rage For the Machine meme.

Freudian slip of the year: here’s Dr. Faulty in Seattle this week, “joking” on camera about how “I developed the ancestral model strain” of Covid. You really can’t make this shit up.

The best meme of the year – via Amy Sukwan – is as good a segue as there could be.

Singles and the Mother of All Blockbuster Revelations For Early April 2022

Gonna make you wait until the end of today’s self-guided playlist for the blockbuster revelation (yeah, you can cheat and scroll down, but you’ll miss a whole bunch of good tunes and lots of laughs). Click on artist names for their webpages, click on titles for streaming audio or video.

Let’s start with what is fast becoming a hallowed tradition here: one of Media Bear‘s reliably funny, snarky protest video pastiches. Today’s pick is based on a surprisingly lesser-known song, unless you were around back in 1988 when the Cure released the title track to their album Fascination Street. The original was a drony, hypnotic downtempo goth-scape. This one’s a close approximation: the parade of creepy tv talking heads leaving a trail of lies that didn’t exactly age well is priceless.

Now for an even more outrageous four minutes of comedy: JP Sears is the best female swimmer in the world, or so it would seem, anyway. This one you have to watch because the sight gags are just as good as the jokes. You will piss yourself laughing. Thanks to Dr. Paul Alexander, the Linton Kwesi Johnson of the freedom movement, for passing it along.

Time to get serious: the central archetype of Lydia Ainsworth‘s lush, ethereally orchestrated new baroque pop single Queen of Darkness “offers protection to her subjects in the most shadowy of times.”

Venus Principle‘s new single Shut It Down is an ominous, bitter 6/8 art-rock anti-lockdown dirge written during the first wave of the 2020 global takeover.

Don’t let the rap-rock format of the Sonic Universe‘s viral smash Hold the Line scare you off: these dudes speak truth to power.

The first single from Lizzy McAlpine‘s brand-new record is aptly titled Erase Me: it’s minor-league Fiona Apple, basically.

The funny backstory behind this live archival audio clip of paradigm-shifting jazz organist Barbara Dennerlein with the Erwin Lehn Orchestra is that when she first heard it, she couldn’t identify it! If you play as many shows as she used to, that’s not as surprising as it might seem. A youtube commenter identifies it as her 1988 tune This Old Fairy Tale. Fairytale or magic moment fortuitously captured on a field recording?

OK – time for the blockbuster revelation. In her daily Rumble feed, Dr. Pam Popper – author of the very first of the plandemic exposes, COVID Operation – explains how the virus was circulating in Spain as early as March of 2019! Researchers at the University of Madrid discovered antibodies – real antibodies, not just protein detritus magnified by a meaningless PCR test – in wastewater from schools and nursing homes. In order to be detectable, levels in wastewater need to be significant.

By now, pretty much everybody is aware that Covid was detected in blood samples of patients in Italy in September of 2019, in France three months earlier, and then in Pike County, Ohio that November. These Spanish revelations only underscore the reality that the virus ran rampant throughout Europe for a full year before the March, 2020 lockdowns. So, in 2019, where were the mounds of dead bodies? Let’s not forget that 2019 was a year with one of the lowest global death rates on record. Why weren’t there refrigerated trailers full of all the corpses that wouldn’t fit in the morgues? Why weren’t all the hospitals overflowing with mortally ill patients? You do the math.

What’s most interesting about the story is that it was originally reported by no less corporate an outlet than Forbes, in June of 2020. Why didn’t it go viral? It may have been hidden behind a paywall before Reuters picked it up. A duckduckgo search also reveals that as obscure as the story was at the time, the censors at the “factcheck” sites all rushed to try to discredit and bury it.

A Mammoth, Deliriously Funny, Searingly Relevant New Recording of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide

Once one dismisses
The rest of all possible worlds
One finds that this is
The best of all possible worlds

So sings Sir Thomas Allen in his role as Dr. Pangloss, in the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus’ epic new recording of Leonard Bernstein’s satirical opera Candide, streaming at Spotify.

When Lillian Hellman enlisted Bernstein and what would become a rapidly expanding cast of lyricists in this ridiculously funny parable of McCarthyite witch hunting, little did anyone involved with the project know how much greater relevance it would have in the months after March of 2020. Marin Alsop leads the orchestra and a boisterous allstar cast of opera talent in a massive double album culled from concert performances in the fall of 2018.

Tenor Leonardo Capalbo plays the title role. Soprano Jane Archibald is Cunegonde and mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter plays the Old Lady, with a supporting cast of Thomas Adkins, Marcus Farnsworth, Katherine McIndoe, Carmen Artaza, Lucy McAuley, Liam Bonthrone, Frederick Jones and Jonathan Ayers in raucous multiple roles. Simon Halsey directs the choir.

Alsop and the orchestra have just as much fun as the singers. Bernstein’s score comes across as almost as satirical as the text. As a parody of centuries of European opera, it’s not quite Scaramouche doing the fandango, but it’s close. The coda of act one is priceless.

For the most part, the plot is consistent with Voltaire’s novel. As you would expect in an operatic context, the characters are infinitely more over-the-top. We learn early on what a horrible pair the credulous Candide and the bling-worshipping Cunegonde make. Innuendo flies fast and furious, and some of the jokes are pretty outrageous for a production first staged in the late 50s. The lyric book by itself is a riot – although it only has the songs, not the expository passages. Listen closely for maximum laughs.

Alsop perfectly nails Bernstein’s tongue-in-cheek seriousness and good-natured melodic appropriation, through one stoically marching, bombastic interlude after another. There’s phony pageantry to rival Shostakovich. Swoony string passages and hand-wrenching arias alternate with the occasional moment where Bernstein drops the humor and lets the sinister subtext waft in. The most amusingly grisly part of the story is set to a parody of the climactic scene in the Mozart Requiem. Brecht/Weill’s Threepenny Opera and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherezade are recurrent reference points.

The most spectacular display of solo vocal pyrotechnics belongs to Archibald – in response to a hanging, appropriately enough. For the choir, it’s the Handel spoof early in the second act. Music this comedic seldom inspires as much repeated listening. And the political content, in an age of divide-and-conquer, speaks truth to what at this moment seems to be rapidly unraveling power.

A Sly Christmukah Ballad From Jazz Guitarist Peter Curtis

A couple of years back jazz guitarist Peter Curtis put out the album Christmas With Your Jewish Boyfriend, a competently played collection of Xmas songs written by Jews. And there’s historical context for that. More than a century ago, for example, it wasn’t uncommon for Jews in Russia and the Pale to celebrate the Christian holiday. What’s somebody else’s simcha, anyway, when it all used to be Saturnalia?

The album’s title track is the real piece de resistance, and Curtis’ only original on it. And it’s a hoot, Curtis crooning to his shiksa GF about all the ways they can have Christmukah fun. No spoilers!

A Darkly Playful, Timely Jazz Reinvention of a Brooding Schubert Suite

One of the most surrealistically enjoyable releases of recent months is a highly improvised instrumental version of Schubert’s Winterreise, an allusively political protest suite disguised as a collection of lovelorn ballads. Artists as diverse as Frank Sinatra and Phil Kline have drawn inspiration from the composer’s brooding early Romanticism, but it’s hard to remember if there’s ever been a jazz interpretation of the whole thing. The collective Madre Vaca are responsible for this crazy stunt, streaming at Bandcamp. The group’s drummer, Benjamin Shorstein gets credit for this fearless, inspired, latin-tinged arrangement.

The opening number, Goodnight, is a marching blend of Cab Calloway hi-de-ho, the Beatles’ For the Benefit of Mr. Kite, and a little of the original courtesy of Jonah Pierre’s piano.

Likewise, the group play up the phantasmagoria in a strutting, waltzing take of The Weathervane, then they loosen, with the horns – Juan Rollan’s sax, Steve Strawley’s trumpet and Lance Reed’s trombone – getting nebulous until the rest of the band pull them back on track.

Shorstein and bassist Mike Perez rise from a klezmer-tinged shuffle as Frozen grows from an ambered gravitas to a postbop jazz crush with high-voltage solos from sax and piano. They reinvent Loneliness as a moodily energetic bossa, guitarist Jarrett Carter’s sage, spacious solo at the center.

Pierre and Carter converse broodingly in The Grey Head, with a chromatically-charged bristle and a more muted tropical tinge. Percussionist Milan Algood fuels the qawwali-ish groove of The Crow: once again, there are hints of klezmer, hard-charging sax and McCoy Tyner-inspired piano, and bubbly guitar solos.

The group make Monk-ish clave jazz out of Last Hope; even with the new syncopation, the underlying angst cuts through, especially when the carnivalesque atmosphere grows insistent. The version of The Stormy Morning here is a cha-cha, Reed’s chuffing trombone setting up a big coda from Strawley. Pierre’s Schubertian salsa piano is one of the funniest moments on the album.

Pierre and an uncredited vocalist do a serviceable, straight-up classical take of The Sun Dogs and close with a deviously Balkan-inflected take of The Hurdy Gurdy Man, Schubert’s disconsolate portrait of the suite’s protagonist all alone on the ice with only a homeless drunk for company.

The Winterreise has special relevance for our time as well. It wasn’t written under a lockdown, but during a serious crackdown on civil liberties under another repressive regime. Schubert changed the order of the Wilhelm Muller poems he used as text in order to fool the censors.

Os Mutantes: Sly Tropical Psychedelic Rock Legends Still Going Strong

Os Mutantes are best-known for jumpstarting the Brazilian psychedelic movement of the 60s. They sang in Portuguese and fractured English, putting a distinctively tropical, wryly humorous spin on the trippiest pop music of the era, a shtick that has become more lovingly satirical over the years. They enjoyed a resurgence back in the 90s and since then have never looked back…other than with their consistently skewed, gimlet-eyed take on classic American and British psychedelia from fifty years ago. Their latest album ZZYZX is streaming at Spotify.

They open the record with Beyond, a jangly, sparkling, Byrdsy twelve-string guitar psych-folk tune that could be legendary Dutch satirists Gruppo Sportivo. “Guilt and medication, you know, is the Catholic way of life,” frontman Sergio Dias sings, earnestly brooding: “To the end I dream by myself.” The music is spot-on Laurel Canyon, 1967: the lyrics, a facsimile that’s so close it’s actually quite laudable.

“How do you think you are all still alive, it is because I am there always by your side,” Dias insists in Mutant’s Lonely Night, a grimly crescendoing anthem, Henrique Peters;  river of organ behind the acoustic guitars, up to a bluesy solo from the bandleader. The Last Silver Bird starts out with jazzy chords and syncopation in the same vein as the Free Design, then the band very subtly shift it into gospel-inspired terrain.

The women in the band sing lead in Candy, a warped take on retro American soul – or just a ripoff of the Move doing the same thing, circa 1965. Gay Matters is a ridiculously unswinging faux-jazz spoof of this era’s confusion over gender roles– maybe that’s part of the joke. The band do the same with early 70s psychedelic funk in We Love You, right down to the warpy, flangey electric piano.

Window Matters is a spot-on early 70s John Lennon spoof and – maybe – a cautionary tale about society growing more and more atomized. “When you’re happy living in the box, closing doors, windows down, no one sees inside,” Dias warns. Por Que Nao is a bossa with woozy synth bass in place of the real thing, while the soul tune Tempo E Espacio is more authentically New Orleans than most American bands could approximate.

The album’s title track is its most ridiculously over-the-top song, a blues about aliens at Area 51. Is the closing number, Void, just a silly sendup of the meme of Indian takadimi counting language, or a genuinely apocalyptic shot across the bow? Dial up the record and decide for yourself.

Holiday Irreverence

On a macro level, holidays are always a good thing. In an era where workers’ rights are under fire more than at any time since the Industrial Revolution, anything that stands in the way of the bosses’ sense of entitlement is worth celebrating.

On the other hand, we in the west have become estranged from the winter solstice and harvest festival best remembered by the latin name Saturnalia. With all the religious associations weighing it down over the centuries, year-end holiday music has become a vomitorium of cheese and schmaltz. It’s time to take our holidays back! Here’s a handful of irreverent sonic treats to inspire you.

Jewish a-cappella group Six13 have a couple of seasonal tunes that deserve to be sung while the dreydl spins. A Star Wars Chanukah has some familiar lyrics set to the tune of John Williams’ Star Wars theme: the video, and the costumes, are the funniest part. Bohemian Chanukah – an update on Bohemian Rhapsody – is just plain LMFAO hilarious. The jokes are too good to give away, but it’s the one about the shonde known as baked latkes that might be the best of the batch. And as much as these guys are a comedy act, they’re actually fine singers.

On the Christmas side, the UK’s most prolific psychedelic punk weirdos, the Pocket Gods have a brand-new album, Rock N Rollin’ Fornicating Xmas streaming at Spotify. Frontman Mark Christopher Lee can’t keep a straight face throughout a punk rock Silent Night. There’s also a phony country song about getting fast food takeout with Jesus; a Ramonesy dis dedicated to Boris Johnson; a number about Christmas masturbation; and a sludgy, Black Angels-esque dirge, I Killed My Parents on Christmas Day. If December 25 bums you out, this will make your day a bit more tolerable.

Irresistibly Quirky Ukulele Fun at the Jalopy

Ukulele bands are supposed to be funny. Saturday night at the Jalopy, the twinbill of Ukulele Scramble and the Ukuladies kept everybody chuckling and frequently laughing out loud for the better part of two hours. Name a comedian who can pull that off.

True to their name, Ukulele Scramble play a lot of mashups. When they’re not twisting styles from across the decades – and centuries – into knots, they’re playing ridiculous segues, and repertoire that was definitely never meant to be played on the uke. When’s the last time you heard ukulele versions of classical compositions by Charles Ives or Amy Beach? Ukulele Scramble did both, and well!

Six years ago, Robin Hoffman described herself as an aspiring uke player. Her main gig was visual art: her two coffee table books feature the illustrations she drew as a regular in the audience at the Jalopy. Last night, on the same stage where she captured a generation of New York Americana music talent in all sorts of revealing, kinetic poses, she played Bach. That was midway through a spiky, sparkling cover of Pink Floyd’s uneasy psychedelic pop classic See Emily Play.

Her sparring partner in this duo project, Richard Perlmutter sparred back and forth with the audience in an endless “name that tune” game when he wasn’t spinning precise spirals and nimbly plucking out complex classical chords. At least as complex as you can play on a uke, anyway

Hoffman sang the night’s funniest song, a version of the Brahms lullaby with new lyrics about being kept awake by a fly in the bedroom – the joke is too good to give away. They did Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue, which more than one uke player in the crowd agreed was the first tune that pretty much everybody learns to play on it. Throughout the set, Perlmutter’s flinty vocals contrasted with Hoffman’s cool torch-singer delivery throughout all sorts of clever syncopation and intricate harmony. The most dizzyingly impressive number was a tonguetwisting can-can remake of piece by Offenbach.

The Ukuladies used to be much more ubiquitous than they are now: ten years ago, you’d find them at Rodeo Bar one day, then at Barbes or Joe’s Pub the next. So it’s no surprise that their irrepressible, theatrical shtick was more about breaking the fourth wall this time out – and maybe especially fresh because of it. Tapdancer Heather Warfel a.k.a. Cousin Bunnie flashed a series of charmingly lo-fi props while uke players Katie Down and Mary Myers a.k.a. Genevieve and her Aunt Mary harmonized together through a mix of Andrews Sisters girl-group jazz numbers and sardonic originals.

Their funniest of those was Put Another Nickel in the Nickelodeon, interspersed with innumerable snippets of cheesy pop songs. They also treated the crowd to Asshole in a SUV – a classic Brooklyn song if there ever was one – and a tongue-in-cheek one about getting gaymarried that managed to poke fun at both those who do and those who object to it. Singing saw player Philippa Thompson a.k.a.  Jimmy Lu – who’d just played a set with another excellent Jalopy act, M Shanghai String Band at the Brooklyn Americana Festival earlier in the day – led the quartet through a witheringly cynical bossa nova parody. Warfel got a turn on lead vocals in a number where it was revealed that the Ukuladies aren’t really a family band: they’re her backing unit.

Ukulele Scramble, based in Massachusetts, are playing Sept 27 at 6:30 PM at the Merriam-Gilbert Public Library, 3 W Main St in West Brookfield, MA.

An Iconic, Fearlessly Populist Brooklyn Band Releases Their Most Ambitious Album in Bushwick Saturday Night

If there’s any New York band who’ve earned a song about themselves, it’s Les Sans Culottes. It’s on their latest album, She is Tossed By the Waves But Does Not Sink, streaming at Bandcamp. That’s the Paris city motto, and there’s no small irony in that the same could be said for the band. Since the 90s, they’ve slowly expanded from their origins as the Spinal Tap of late 60s French ye-ye psychedelic pop, to become as eclectic as the New York borough they represent used to be before the blitzkrieg of out-of-state white yuppies and “luxury” condos. No other New York band have spoken out as witheringly or accurately against the blight of gentrification as this shapeshifting crew – in spot-on, slangy French, no less. They’re playing the album release show this Saturday night, June 2 at 10 PM at El Cortez in Bushwick. The show isn’t listed on the venue calendar, but if they charged $20 for Amy Rigby, this should be about half that or less.

Along the way, the group have weathered several lineup changes and even a lawsuit by a spinoff of the band. That the Sans Culottes brand would be worth taking to court speaks for itself. This latest edition, fronted by founder Clermont Ferrand, is the most stylistically eclectic ever. While there are a few songs that bring to mind late 60s Serge Gainsbourg or Françoise Hardy, the satire is subtler than ever. Their signature mockery of French would-be rockers stumbling through all sorts of American idioms is still there, but the songs span from lush new wave to Stonesy rock to faux funk, stadium anthems and the noir.

The opening track’s title, Eiffel Tour is a Franglais pun – in French, it’s Le Tour Eiffel. It’s as much a musical as lyrical spoof, a shuffling early 70s style French faux funk tune driven by keyboardist Benoit Bals’ trebly Farbisa over Jacques Strappe’s drums and M. Pomme Frite’s bass. It’s the band’s An American in Paris:

Je prends mon élan
Et parle en verlan
Nous sommes en terrasse

[This is tough to translate, and indicative of how clever this band’s lyrics are. The first couple of lines roughly equate to “I get up the nerve and talk in verlan,” a French counterpart to pig Latin from the late 80s Paris banlieu Arab ghetto. “Nous sommes en terrasse,” meaning literally “We’re on the terrace,” was a meme referring to how resolute the French remained in the wake of the 2015 massacre at the Charlie Hebdo office. In that context, it’s “We’re just chilling.”]

There’s more Bals on this album than any of the band’s previous releases. Case in point: the warbly Wurlitzer electric piano and swirly organ on the more authentically funky second number, which is also more musically than lyrically satirical.

Chuchotements Chinois (Chinese Whispers – a reference to the French obsession with the Cure, maybe?) sets Geddy Liaison’s Rolling Stones guitar and lush vocals from the band’s two women singers, Kit Kat Le Noir and Brigitte Bordeaux, over a coy new wave strut with a sly resemblance to a popular 80s hit by French band Indochine. The phony bossa De Rien is a cluelessly chipper breakup number complete with breathy boudoir vocals and loungey piano.

The glossy, synthy 80s-style Chibeca v. Chewbacca shoots a spitball at sleazy developers trying to rename New York neighborhoods: rebranding gritty, constantly shrinking Chinatown as part of shi-shi Tribeca isn’t quite as moronic as calling the South Bronx the Piano District, but it’s close.

The jaunty doo-wop rock of L’Histoire des Sans Culottes chronicles the band’s triumphs and tribulations:

NOUS AVONS EU DES IMITATEURS,
BANDES D’HOMMAGES, MAUVAIS DOPPELGÄNGERS
En manque évident de savoir faire
Ersatz inferieurs sorry ass loseurs

[We’ve had imitators
Tribute bands, bad doppelgangers
Who obviously couldn’t get things done…]

You don’t really need a translation for that last line, right?

Je Ne Sais Quoi pokes playful fun at French pronouns over a slightly less retro backdrop. Along with their Cure obsession, the French also have a rabid Stooges cult, which the band salute in Detroit Rock Cite – which actually sounds more like AC/DC with keys. Mismatched styles are also the joke in A La Mode, an ersatz Stones-flavored shout out to Prince. The band follow that with La Ballade de Johnny X, poking wistful fun at the femme fatale tradition as personified by noir acts like Juniore. 

The catchy, riff-rocking Je M’en Fous (I Don’t Give a Fuck) opens with the line “Tawdry Adieu ou Audrey Tautou” and stays just as amusing from there, with a snide reference to French misadventures in imperialism. In the Hall of the Ye Ye King (Agathe Bauer) is a mock-rock salute to the power of unlikely one-hit wonder Euro-pop. The album winds up on a surprisingly somber note with the lavish art-rock epic Aller Sans Retour (One Way Ticket). Your appreciation of this album will increase immeasurably if you speak French – check the band’s priceless lyrics page– but it’s not necessary. Look for this on the best albums of 2018 list at the end of the year if Trump doesn’t blow us all up by then.