Their latest release, A Tout Moment, released in October this year is contained within the Amazon widget to the left. I’ve just bought this album today and as I write this have not yet listened to it – this is today’s motivation to get to the gym. A treadmill full of Eiffel awaits me once I’ve published this post. Or should that be “an Eiffel of treadmill?”.

UPDATE: I’ve had my first listen to the album and there are a two or three tracks that sound great – in particular there is some blinding drumming and some truly dramatic sections of the film soundtrack kind. The clean guitar on Mort J’Appelle put me in mind of the acoustic sections that intersperse W.A.S.P.’s The Crimson Idol, an album which is one of my guilty pleasures and is currently coming nostalgically through my computer’s speakers. God, I’d forgotten how much I loved that damn album. When it finishes I am going to listen to Eiffel’s offering again and see if I can’t write a readable review.

The song I am going to translate here is A Tout Moment La Rue which you can listen to in its entirety online on their website where you can also find the lyrics.

We find another left-wing reference à la this song. Thanks to the community at the Word Reference Forums I now know that the “trois cent familles” is a reference to the concept that a small number of privileged and wealthy families are running the country.

We have a problem in the translation. Avoir pignon sur rue means to be well-established. In the lyric “ces trois cent familles qui sur la rue ont pignon à tout moment elle peut aussi dire non” the “elle” refers to “la rue” so we have to keep the word street in the translation of the expression. Which frankly isn’t possible so the translation is rather a hack. Ideas welcome.

The song he is attacking is the song I’m going to translate today.

Marie Mai first gained fame as one of the finalists of Star Académie, a Québécois version of those shows such as X-Factor, Pop Idol, etc… that we have all come to know and [hate/love/ignore]. A talented singer who would be unlikely to make the cut on an English version as we seem to prefer to pick people that we can use for headline-fodder rather than finding real singers.

Her style is very much in the same arena as that of Avril Lavigne and although I’m not sure if I should admit it, I have to say that I do kind of enjoy this sort of rocky pop when it’s done well. Albeit in small doses.

The 2007 album Dangereuse Attraction opened with a very strong track called Mentir. As you may already know I keep a play list of songs to help me make it through my gym sessions and Mentir is a song that has been in that list for a while.

Version 3.0 does not start as well as Dangereuse Attraction, although the first two tracks are still pretty good. However track three C’est Moi descends into a realm of pop music with which I’m not really very comfortable – Cher-style voice screwery and other electro-effects – nothing horrific but enough to turn me off. Track four Garde Tes Larmes “Keep your tears” starts off in much the same vein although quickly improves with a chorus that is amongst the best on the album.

Next up is what I consider to be the strongest song on the album Secrets. It then all cruises along until Plaisirs Amers where we once again have to listen to voice-fiddling but this is balanced out with hints of some heavier guitar riffs which come excitingly close to leaning towards the metal that I often go into dark corners to listen to.

Rebâtir Notre Histoire is probably the weakest song. It starts pretty badly then tries to improve but then gives up.

The album finishes with the English language song Do You – half rock, half dance – decent enough but essentially just more of the same. This is, for me, the biggest problem with the album. Although perfectly solid with a very fine singer and some decent tracks, everything’s a little samey whereas I felt that Dangereuse Attraction had far more variety and interest.

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.

My cousin also came with me to this gig and as neither she nor my girlfriend speak French, have any interest at all in French music, and are at best sceptical about my taste in music, I was praying that the show would be fantastic.

One track from their 2009 album, Le Belle Étoile has recently become available on the UK store. This is one of my favourites from the album, and the track with which the band opened.

The support act had been a female-fronted rock band whose name I still do not know but intend to find out. Update: the support band was iCON Smash My Box! I thought they did a fine job and they sounded different enough from the all-to-common stock rock of our times to make me want to hear more. What’s more is that we knew from their performance that the sound in the room was great.

As the multitude of Babylon Circus band members squeezed onto the stage and launched in Perdu there was no doubt that this was going to be something special. Much as I have always rated their albums, particularly their latest release, the recorded tracks are yet overshadowed by how well the band look, perform and sound on stage. How on Earth do you get ten musicians sounding so great together without a conductor? I can only assume that enormous credit has to go to the sound technicians. I have seen truly great bands reduced to a total mess on stage due to bad sound levels and/or acoustics.

The lead singer, who through energy-induced necessity had been rendered topless by the end of the night addressed the crowd in English while trying to whip us all up into a bunch of bouncing madmen and madwomen. I imagine this was one of the smaller crowds they will have played to this year but I think we held our own. Certainly there were very few people just standing back in mute appreciation. My girlfriend and I made our way through three bottles of red wine during the show and I am not entirely sure what work of witchcraft has managed to see me feeling fine today after the thorough shaking to which my guts were subjected.

Following Perdu were two songs that I have previously translated on this site, De la musique et du bruit and J’aurais bien voulu, both from the 2004 album Dances of Resistance. I had great confidence that my two companions for the night would enjoy most of the stuff from La Belle Étoile, but was less sure about their earlier music which was much more ska/reggae based, and much more revendicatif as I believe the French say. I needn’t have worried because, as I mentioned at the beginning of this blog entry, it was after De la musique et du bruit that I was relieved to hear the words “Oh my God, they’re really good.”

This is certainly a band whose live performance depends very much on the crowd getting on its feet and losing itself in the music.

I’ve always been a bouncer. A few pints and the arrival of Nightboat to Cairo at a friend’s birthday bash on Saturday night had been enough to make my night. Multiply that by some enormous number and that’s how I felt at The Jazz Café yesterday. Oh my God, they really were really good!

Two encores were not enough!

As promised, I’m following up my previous post with a translation of the final track on the album Pépé Goes Français.

Extracts of all the songs on the album are provided in the previous post.

La ballade des gens heureux was originally written and performed by Gérard Lenorman. You can compare and contrast five different versions of the song by clicking the Amazon widget to the left.

Pépé’s is the second on the list, and by far, far, far, in my opinion, the best version.

Given that Pépé’s version was the first time I’d heard this song, it’s quite strange to hear that it really was a “ballad” originally, but, as you can hear, it clearly was.