January 11, 2010

Everybody Was In The French Resistance - Fixin' The Charts

Everybody Was In The French Resistance, a side project of Art Brut's Eddie Argos and the Blood Arm's Dyan Valdés, revives the long tradition of answer songs. They seemingly chose a random assortment of pop songs to respond to from Michael Jackson to Bob Dylan to Kanye West. I'm not sure these will ever reach the heights of Etta James' "Wallflower" or Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama", but it's surprising how consistently good and cohesive the album is. The songs are all entertaining and clever even if you don't know the original songs, although listening to each song back to back with its inspiration is a lot of fun. In particular I like "GIRLFREN (You Know I Got A)", a response to Avril Lavigne' s "Girlfriend", and "Superglue", a response to Elastica's "Vasaline". All the songs are loaded with pop culture observation and undeniably Argos, especially "Walk Alone", which is just as good on its own.

4 Comments:

awmercy said...

For now, the best place to hear their music is on their website. I will add audio or video as they are released.

Doctor Diggs said...

Art Brut + The Blood Arm??? Yes, please.

Mona said...

Wow, I think that's the first time I read "Elastica" on this site... totally takes me back to when their self-titled used to be on the first page of my car's CD binder. Thanks for the throwback!

awmercy said...

I know!

I really hope there is a Volume 2.