Welsh And French Interlopers Turn Vintage American Pop Into Fast Food

As redundant sequels by one-joke bores go, Bande à Part is duller than Hooked on Classics 3. The premise—samba covers of Reagan-era college AOR—fails because most of the albums in that genre sounded like lounge pop anyway. Whoever sings the mewling massacre of Yazoo's "Don't Go" sounds like Faster Pussycat's Taime Downe after a curb stomp. Jim Morrison gets more visitors than any living Parisian but that's no reason for the French to keep trying to revive Echo & the Bunnymen. (The Heaven 17 one isn't bad, though.) Chipmunk Punk's greatness wasn't dependent on Alvin etc.'s unusual range and technique, but some of that might make Nouvelle Vague's music minimally interesting. Charlotte Church is a classically trained Welsh person like John Cale, even though the album title is a Lou Reed one-liner. Currently famous in the U.K. for a commercial in which she lies on a sofa eating potato chips, she'd probably be found next covering "Animal Language" and doing onstage Santeria with a bucket of KFC. Charlotte's album has been out forever and is probably impossible to find anyway, but nobody cares about that when it comes to classical music. Look at Metal Machine Music. Dave Queen Nouvelle Vague play Webster Hall Tuesday at 8, $25, bowerypresents.com.