Paris JeT'aime: Stereo Total, Les Sans Culottes, Octopus Project

Les Sans Culottes may be a band comprised of musicians with made up names singing songs with absurd lyrics in fake French (that’s “Franglais” to you), but there’s something a bit more serious about them since a 2005 lawsuit split the band in two. Half went one way to become Nous Non Plus, and the other half recruited 5 new Culottes and the battle of the Fake French Bands from New York City was declared. I’m not going to pronounce a victor in this messy fight, which if one trolls the web for any length of time can see stinks like week old fromage, but I can say that from recent shows and repeated listenings to LSC’s latest release “Le Weekender”, the new Culottes are far better off without the old. The reason is simple – the old Culottes could be fun, but the new Culottes really and truly ROCK.

Tonight’s show finds the band giving more nods to the past than their set in Boston a month ago. It includes nuggets like “Sa Sabine”, the Babar inspired “SOS elephants”, and “Allo Allo”, but they really tear it up when they get to newer numbers like “Les Yeux Grands Sauvent Le Monde”, "La Semaine A Deux Jeudis" (complete with choreography), and oddly, a killer cover of “My Sharona” (in French of course). The girls all have great legs and wear great shoes, bandleader Clermont Ferrand gives his best Serge Gainsbourg, and the rest of the band are tight as the cork on a bottle of Dom Pérignon. In a word: "Oui".

I had an entirely different expectation of The Octopus Project than how it all turned out. From the tracks I’d heard already (thanks Nick), I’d pegged the Austin quartet as being more of a bloop and blip kind of affair, but on stage, surrounded by amps disguised as giant light up bunnies (or possibly, as a friend pointed out, bunny-klansmen) and a screen that ran a series of creepycute images that were more creepy than cute, they jolted their way through their instrumental set with more electricity and sweat than they had to. I mean, as it was I would have paid good money to simply stare at the gravity defying hairdo of keyboardist Yvonne Lambert and get the measurements of her fabulous asymmetrical dress. The rest of the set, including heart churning versions of “The Adjustor” and “Tuxedo Hat” were merely gravy.

I hadn’t been thinking much about Stereo Total lately but it was hard to not be convinced by their brilliance after tonight. One large stage, two small people, a bare bones drum kit for chanteur Françoise Cactus and a small keyboard for everything else man Brezel Goering. Long and lean, Goering spends the hour running around the stage, drumming on the plumbing pipes protruding overhead, pressing various buttons on his tiny keyboard to release the preprogrammed samples, reading lyrics off a piece of paper, and occasionally diving into the audience to crowd surf. Cactus wears giant glasses, spits out her eccentric twitterbird warbles through a thick accent, reads music off a music stand and stops occasionally to blot sweat from her face and cheerily comment of the nightclub temperature “So I guess the A/C is kaput, eh?” Songs come fast and furious from covers of The Plastics and Salt n' Pepa to originals like “Musique Automatique” and “Ta Voix Au Telephone”, each rendered in somewhat minimalistic form, but the band are so enthusiastic its impossible to not get caught up with their fervor. The sold out crowd spill onto the stage for songs like "L' Amour A 3" and by the time they end with “Everybody At the Discotheque (I Hate)” the sold out crowd are all pumping their fists in the air and singing along. It’s my friend Rob’s third time seeing Stereo Total and before we leave he shakes his head when he admits he was thinking about not coming out tonight but now is so glad he did. Aren’t we all?