Les Étrangers Wed., Jan 7

[January 7th, 2009]

[FRANCOPHILES ONLY] Tribute acts exist to help us suspend our disbelief that we are seeing our favorite rock bands in their heydays.

It’s a concept I understood but never fully appreciated until I discovered Les Étrangers. The Portland-based quartet speaks directly to my musical obsessions by bringing me back to Paris in the mid-’60s, when the charts were filled with punchy, gooey pop sung by kittenish singers like France Gall and Jane Birkin—all crafted by the nicotine-stained hands of Serge Gainsbourg.

“It’s really a record-collector-geek band,” says bandleader and drummer Larold Will. “You have to spend a lot of money to get your hands on some of the records from this era. This band sometimes feels just like an excuse to do that.”

The crate-digging group—which includes Will, chanteuse Ellen Louise, Joel Kraft on guitare électrique and David Boicourt on guitare basse—perform a cracking set of their favorite French pop tracks from names both recognized (Françoise Hardy) and long-forgotten (Anouk).

But unlike their tribute brethren, Les Étrangers don’t aim to produce carbon copies of the songs they are covering. “For us, it’s not how can we sound exactly like the original,” says Louise, “but how we can best do justice to them.”

To do that, many tracks have been stripped down from their lush, orchestral roots to fit the limitations of a four-piece. Others, though, were custom made for this group. “I had never heard Jacques Dutronc until two years ago,” says Will, “but his first record is as raw as anything the Kinks did. It just happened to be in French.”

Both Will and Louise acknowledge the challenges of performing this music. For the drummer, it is letting go of his experimental and jazz mindset and learning to stick to simple Motown-inspired beats. Louise, on the other hand, has to try to evoke the sound of her favorite singers while adding her own stamp to the songs.

And if they don’t quite hit the mark, well, that’s where their band name comes in handy.

“It can mean ‘The Strangers,’ which fits since we all met through Larold’s ad on Craigslist,” says Louise. “But it also means ‘The Foreigners,’ which gives us a pass in case there happen to be any French people at our shows.”