As promised, today’s post is a translation from La Belle Étoile.

Marions-Nous Au Soleil (Let’s Get Married In The Sun), features Karina Zeviani and is the second track on La Belle Étoile which was the subject of the yesterday’s post.

A few pieces of interesting vocabulary to look at. I struggled to translate “ma caille” which means literally “my quail”. This is an affectionate term for a girlfriend and I searched my brainbox for English birdy equivalents but failed to find anything.

Unfortunately there is currently a problem with the Amazon widget creator which means that I have only been able to include seven tracks from the album on the widget to the left. Luckily they are seven of the best. You can hear samples from all tracks here.

Unless something spectacular happens over the next four weeks, I can confidently state that La Belle Étoile is the finest French language album of 2009. I absolutely adore it.

I was privileged to be able to catch two performances by Babylon Circus while they were on the UK leg of their current European tour and given half a chance I fully intend to travel over to France and see them again in the new year.

They are one of the best live bands I’ve ever seen and I for one hope they gain the massive recognition they deserve.

La Belle Étoile, released in March 2009, is something of a musical departure for the band whose last album was release five years ago. Previous studio releases have been packed with hard ska and reggae beats and more than a dash of the revendicatif. This album is slightly more melodic and slightly more subtle and devastating with its attack on your whatever part of your brain is responsible for trapping catchy songs in the internal humbox.

Every base is covered from the thumping, concert-opening Perdu, the thumping, crowd-pleasing La Cigarette, to the understated Des Fois and Le Fils Caché Du Pape to the gorgeous voice of Karina Zeviani on Marions-nous au soleil and the embarrassingly-catchy Nina.

What can I say? I love it. I urge you to use the Amazon widget to the left to listen to extracts.

Tomorrow I will publish a translation of one of the tracks – haven’t decided which yet.

What I did find that day that did get under my skin was a group called Les Gars Dans L’Coin (The guys in the corner). Having listened several times now to The Radioactive Beets Show and to their #8604 EP, I am a very big fan.

A couple of weeks before that I had discovered, just in time, thanks to the invisible hand of the God of Ska, that Babylon Circus were playing London on October 26th, a gig which turned out to be so good that I went to see them again the following Saturday in Bristol.

Take a look at some of these photos of the guys on tour and tell me you don’t want to see them live!

Which leads quite smoothly into the fact that I’m currently working on something of an epic post which is taking much longer than expected. Regular readers may have noticed a half-cocked post called “Eight things that make a great live band” appeared accidentally on Sunday night. I have since revised the title to the 12.5% more exciting “Nine things that make a great live band” and hopefully I’ll be publishing it either tomorrow or Thursday.

Listen to the extracts above and consider getting a copy of The Radioactive Beets Show – it’s absurdly good value at £4.99 from the Amazon MP3 store which, as I’ve mentioned before, integrates flawlessly with your iTunes library if necessary.

Here are the links to the band’s pages on Facebook and Myspace.

The time will come when I decide to write my top ten list of the best French language albums of 2009.

You know what it’s like when you make a list like that – you’ve probably got three or four “no-brainers” which are going to be in there no matter what, and then you may have a dozen or more other albums from which you’re going to have to choose for the remaining spaces.

One thing I didn’t think I would have to think very hard about was the number one spot. Until today one album had towered above the rest – La Ruda’s Grand Soir.

Today I heard Babylon Circus’s 2009 album La Belle Étoile. Now I have a decision to make.

It’s incredibly good, in my opinion their best album yet. I was looking forward to seeing Babylon Circus live on the 26th October before I heard the album. Now I can’t wait.

All that whittering aside, here is a translation of one of the really catchy numbers on Grand Soir, possibly the best album of 2009.

The lyrics of La Parade de Gordon Banks refer to one of the most memorable moments in English football history – a superhuman, physics-defying save by Gordon Banks against Brazil in the 1970 World Cup Finals in Mexico. A game, unfortunately, that we (England) went on to lose 1-0.

I have embedded a YouTube video of the save below.

Thanks to the WordReference forums I was able to get my mind around the following bizarre lyric…

Ressortir du ventre is being used in this context to mean something similar to prendre aux tripes which means something that is gut-wrenching, gripping, in the sporting sense – for further detail you can read here.

I suspect that there is more of a story behind this song than I am aware of and I would be delighted if anyone has anything to say on the subject – please let me have your comments!