Boston Now
08/23/2007
Many questions arise when you get into the musical world of the band Les Sans Culottes.
Are they French? Then why are they from Brooklyn? Are they really singing in French, or are they making it up as they go along? And why was it so hard not to dance when I hear them play?
Founding member Clermont Ferrand, who goes by his real, more Anglicized name, Bill Carney, when he’s not on stage, cares only about the last question when it comes to explaining his band.
“I was visiting friends in Paris, and they turned me on to all this great pop music, and I became obsessed with it. I knew it was something I wanted to create myself,” Carney said. “When I got back to Brooklyn, I started putting together a band, but it took awhile to find people who were as passionate about French pop music as I was.”
Since forming nine years ago, Les Sans Culottes has gone through several different lineups and put out five CDs of the kind of French pop music Carney fell in love with way back when.
As to whether he’s worried if people “get it” after all these years, Carney just sighed in a very French sort of way. “I think people who come see the show enjoy the music we make and the energy we bring to it,” he said. “It’s not about understanding everything we say. Some of my favorite bands, like The Clash and Led Zeppelin, can’t be understood all the time, and they sing in English.”
Pop ‘stache
12/22/2011
Les Sans Culottes – ‘Pataphysical Graffiti
by Craig Bechtel
Named after the working-class revolutionaries of the French Revolution, and born 200 years after said revolution ended, this NYC septet have released their seventh full-length record, featuring 16 slices of passionate French indie pop.
But to call it that is really a misnomer. ‘Pataphysical Graffiti is a collection of rock tunes that borrows the language and instrumentation of the genre but removes the “twee” and “preciousness” that one might expect to hear from a group that does “French indie pop.”
One need not look further than the title of record for the best evidence that this is really a rock record.
‘Pataphysical Graffiti was inspired by the idea of an imaginary meeting of the Led Zeppelin double album Physical Graffiti and the French writer Alfred Jarry’s “science” of ‘pataphysics, which is almost as difficult to explain as the origin of the band’s name (apparently, the French aristocracy pre-Revolution wore fancy knee breech pants called culottes, and the working-class revolutionaries refused to wear that kind of pants).
TimeOut New York
Brooklyn’s Les Sans Culottes have taken the whole faux-French-band thing pretty far-the group’s live shows are superenergetic, fake-multicultural events. You might not learn anything about French culcha, but you’ll probably hop around like a lunatic.