Nous Non Plus
Label: Aeronaut
Rated: NONE
WorkNameSort: Nous Non Plus
The members of NNP have funny French pseudonyms and they met at the Rhode Island School of Design. (Although I’m just assuming that they’re pseudonyms, the odds are pretty good that the singer was not born with the name Céline Dijon, nor do the bassist’s parents call him Jean-Luc Retard.) While the in-joke of the band’s goofily Gallic concept is easy to ascribe to collegiate shenanigans, you’d be doing yourself a grave disservice to dismiss Nous Non Plus as being too smart for their own good. In fact, the best thing about this self-titled debut is how much stupid fun it is. Having yet to determine exactly what they want to sound like, François Hardonne (stop me now) and the rest of the band throw a little bit of Plastic Bertrand, a soupçon of Laetitia Sadier and a whole lot of Jane Birkin into the mix. Thus, it swings some (“Monokini”), gets raunchily funky (“One Night in Paris”), loses itself in atmospheric groove (“Après-Soleil”) and never allows its knowing wink to turn into a condescending leer. Which makes it not very French at all.
This article appears in Dec 14-20, 2005.