Yesterday I pointed you in the direction of the new release from Vulgaires Machins, an album of eleven acoustic songs, available for the donation of your choice from their website.

I’ve listened to the album half a dozen times since downloading it and I love it – I don’t need to review it for you – download a copy and check it out for yourself.

Here is a translation of “A”, originally released on the 2006 album “Aimer Le Mal” which you can sample using the Amazon widget on the right.

I don’t know what “cady” means – the best I can discover is that it is a make of motorbike. If you know, please share.

You could do worse things right now than pay a visit to the Boutique area of the Vulgaires Machins website.

Today the band released an eleven-track acoustic album which they are allowing you to download for whatever price you would like to pay.

This includes the ability to download for free in exchange for your email address.

I can’t provide a review yet or any translations as I have only this minute finished downloading it myself and am currently listening to the second track.

Suffice it to say that Vulgaires Machins are one of my favourite francophone rock bands and I highly recommend that you get a copy of this album.

I had been looking forward to Ycare’s second album, Lumière Noire for several months. His first album, Au Bord Du Monde is a great record and I had expected more of the same from his follow up, released on June 6th.

On first listen, I was disappointed. Au Bord Du Monde was loaded with clean guitars and had a very acoustic feel. The latest release has veered more towards being a pop album, with much more keyboard effects and with a much more poppy, dancey feel.

However, the whole album has grown on me after several listens and while I don’t think it will ever overtake his first offering as one of my favourite albums, it will certainly get many plays.

Here is a translation of the second track, Lap Dance, a single that was released some time before the album itself.

Incry’s first album, Face au Mur, is one of the heavier, and better, rock albums to be released recently in the French language. Incry produce what you might call a heavy, melodic rock which hits me right where I live, although I realise this may be slightly heavier than most people stumbling across this page may be looking for.

There’s no real need to to make comparisons to other bands, but if I had to I would say the band they put me most in mind of is Staind. The first track is very Faith No More-ish in many ways but just listen to the samples in the widget to the right of this page to get a feel for the album.

Here is a translation of the third track, L’effaceur – a word which translates as “Eraser”, just as the Arnie film of the same name was translated to L’effaceur in French.

I’m off to the gym to try to cycle another 12 miles on one of those evil bikes.

Hopefully my mind will be somewhat distracted from the grim reality of my lack of fitness by La Ruda’s new album, Odéon 1014, which I have just picked up from the Amazon MP3 store, which, happily was £2 cheaper than on iTunes.

I’ve not heard any samples from this album yet, which you can do now by using the widget to the right, but given La Ruda’s track record I’m not expecting to be disappointed.

All going well, the next post will be brief review and a translation of at least one of the songs.

Update: The stand out track for me on this album (and by some way) is track nine “1982.”

Le Vilain Volatile are a fantastic French rock/ska band whose first and only album is, as far as I’m aware, available for MP3 purchase only at Xtrib.com.

How such a great band is not more widely known, I can only guess.

This song, Banal Killer is my favourite track on the album. An upbeat ska/rock track on the album but you can listen to a far gentler, more sinister, and no less excellent acoustic version on the band’s Wat.TV channel, along with three more similarly de-rocked tracks from the album.

The song starts with a verse of parental clichés before becoming a great deal more disturbing.

I stumbled across the acoustic recording while I was preparing a translation for this post and noticed the word “Houellebecq” added to the title. I don’t know what this means but it wouldn’t be out of place it it were a reference to the award-winning and controversial author Michel Houellebecq whose novels are often shocking and laced with anti-societal themes.

It’s been a couple of months since I made a translation here. I was out for a run last night listening for the first time to Bénabar’s 2003 debut album and the song Dis-Lui Oui made me chuckle a little and that was as good a reason as any to break the silence.

Bénabar’s songs are really great for anyone learning French – very lyrical, story driven songs with a great variety of vocabulary and natural expressions, and on top of that they are clearly sung by a man who’s voice is not intensely annoying like so many other French singers of the genre. I suspect his songs are in no danger of being labelled particularly cool, but most of them are catchy and often amusing.

Whilst watching Acoustic on TV5 Monde on Saturday night, I heard the music of Ben L’Oncle Soul for the first time and I was massively impressed both by the stage performance and the music. The self-titled debut album was released on May 17th.

Unfortunately the album is not yet available to purchase from Amazon of iTunes in the UK or the USA so the widgets to the left are both from the French departments of those stores.

The album contains a roughly half and half mixture of English and French lyrics, including, incidentally, a cover of The White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army.

My favourite track on the album is probably “Ain’t off to the back.” but my first translation is of the first French track on the album, “Soulman“.

I will take this opportunity to plug my work-in-progress at FrenchVerbTest.com to which I will soon be adding a section related the vocabulary charts which are included with each song translation on GreatFrenchSongs.com.

I was asked to translate this song in a comment from a previous Vulgaires Machins translation.

In the run-up to the UK election I had wanted to keep things reasonably topical, and luckily this fits well (excuse the pun), the title summing up the attitude of some of our politicians’ spending plans for the future, and the song being about the quality of information we demand, and receive, from the media.

Puits Sans Fond, “Bottomless pit” is from the excellent album Compter Les Corps.

In retaliation for our treatment of their banks, Iceland sent a cloud of volcanic ash over Britain yesterday which grounded all air traffic for the first time in our history.

Living in London and being used to hearing and seeing a new plane every couple of minutes, it feels very bizarre to be plunged back into the nineteenth century.

In recognition of this, here is a translation of Le Ciel est Gris (The Sky is Grey) by Volo. This is from the 2006 album Blancs Manteaux à Volo, although I think his latest album (En Attendant, Sep 2009) is much better.

I should mention that the correlation between the song and current events begins and ends with the title!