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.

I’m surprised I didn’t take advantage of the Pope’s visit to my home town last month to post a translation of this song from my favourite French album.

Le Fils Caché Du Pape, written for the group by Mickaël Furnon (Mickey 3D) is one of the slower, creeping songs on La Belle Étoile, perhaps not with the instant rampant appeal of a Nina, a Perdu or a Sista but still a winner.

One of only three tracks on the album that contains no English lyrics at all (if you don’t include the instrumental Valsamourette). The others are L’envol and La Cigarette.

I’d like to translate La Belle Étoile in its entirety so over the next few weeks I’ll try to post one translation per week from the album.

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.

Two weeks ago I was searching for something fresh. I was really looking for some new French singing rock band. I didn’t find much – I came across one track by Bony Hide which, although pretty good and indeed like gold when compared with some of the horrors I’d been listening to that day, didn’t really get under my skin.

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.

Well as it happens, Les Gars Dans L’Coin weren’t the support act for Babylon Circus the very next day in Dunkirk, France.

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.

Babylon Circus are currently on their European tour and I was blessed to have been able to see them in Camden Town on Monday. They are in Liverpool tonight and then finish their UK dates in Bristol tomorrow.

Their other European dates can be found here.

So, to mark this, here is the translation of La Caravane which is the third translation on this site from the 2004 album Dances of Resistance.

You can see the band performing La Caravane in the top video to the left. The bottom video is Mister Conqueror from Woodstock 2006 – no translation necessary there but it is one of the higher quality clips of the band performing live.

If you have the opportunity at all to get down and see them in Bristol tomorrow, 31st October, I thoroughly recommend that you do so.

The French expression Les chiens aboient, la caravane passe means something in the area of “let people say what they will”, the image is of continuing to do something regardless of the noise being made about it.

“Oh my God, they’re really good” were the words spoken by my girlfriend at the end of the second song of Babylon Circus’s appearance last night in Camden Town, home of Madness, who, if you didn’t already know, are one of the greatest bands of all time.

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.

It was, in fact, one of the best gigs I’ve been to in a long time. It’s a shame I’m not a better writer otherwise I may be able to give you sense of why I enjoyed it so much. I can tell you that I’m currently wondering if I can justify hauling myself over to Bristol on Halloween to see them for a second time. Tour dates available here.

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!

I mentioned in my last post that I had discovered two new albums while browsing XTrib.com.

The first was the monkey album. The second is an album from 2007 called The Radioactive Beets Show by Les Gars Dans L’coin. You can listen to extracts from this album as well as extracts from their 2009 EP #8604 by using the widget to the left. I particularly recommend tasting the five tracks on #8604.

You’ll notice that the widget highlights most of the tracks from the first album as having explicit lyrics. I’m not quite sure about this, but I’ll take a closer listen and perhaps translate one of the tracks here at some point to see if we can find out what they’re getting at.

Having been brought up on a diet of Madness and Iron Maiden it is not surprising that the two styles of music that underpin many of my musical tastes are ska and rock. There is plenty to indicate here that this band, like La Ruda, may be able to tickle both hungers. Tracks Georges Clooney, Uranus, 8604 Code Lgdlc are just some fine examples.

As an aside, it’s interesting to note that France provides all you can eat in terms of ska but if you are looking for French-language rock then you’ll generally have more luck looking towards Quebec.

I am currently searching from some new, inspiring rock band but am having little luck – indeed it was while searching for something with a bit of meat that I stumbled across these guys, and although not quite what I was looking for, I’m very glad I did, and there is enough distorted guitar to keep the cravings in check.

The Radioactive Beets Show and #8604 both merit a good listening. Oh, and did I mention that The Radioactive Beets Show can be picked up for 4.99 GBP on Amazon? I certainly don’t remember the last time I got as much bang for my buck, and the ink’s only two years dry on the album sleeve.

And now I should now start thinking about another translation for the next post.

I discovered a great site today on which I found two albums that sounded as if they may be pretty good. I then found the albums on Amazon for under a fiver each. So I bought them.

J’achète is the debut album by Les Singes Savants and was released in May this year.

I know of many a musical gem that has been hidden beneath a cover of inanity but even so, as my “performing monkeys” were downloading it did occur to me that I may need to grow up.

I had listened to the samples on xtrib.com (you can listen to them by clicking the Amazon widget on the left or using the iTunes link to launch your local iTunes store), and with just one or two exceptions, I liked what I heard.

As I started listening to the album and to the opening title track J’achète, I thought I had made a bit of a mistake – I didn’t really like what I was hearing – it was all a bit flat, a little juvenile and a bit too simplistic. Well, that will teach me to fall for the monkeys, I conceded.

The second track didn’t do a great deal to change my mind but it was quite a foot-tapper so I kept listening (yes, believe me there are albums that I have bought and never listened to fully!)

I had to replay the third track because it was so catchy, track four held its head high and had me wondering what on Earth “tutto va bene” meant (it’s Italian for “tout va bien”, or “all is well”) and by track eight I realised that I was listening to an album that I was truly enjoying. Track eight, incidentally, is currently my favourite on the album is the reason for the title of this article (caboche being slang for “head”.)

Despite the monkeys and the foolery this album contains several songs of an impressive level of song-writing and production. And it’s fun. Even track one sounded fairly good the second time around.

I’m very familiar with albums that start really strong and tail off towards the end. I’m not as familiar with albums such as J’achète which almost got gonged at track two.

Oh, the other album! Yes, I’ll tell you about that tomorrow.

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!