Various Artists
Nouvelle Vague: Coming Home
Stereo Deluxe/ Inertia


Though they're better known for their cheesy bossa nova/ chanson covers of new wave hits, Nouvelle Vague prove on this compilation that there's some substance and musical knowledge behind the schtick. For their edition of the 'Coming Home' series, they've chosen to compile a range of music drawn from film soundtracks and all the usual suspects are here: Ennio Morricone, Lalo Schifrin, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Nino Rota and plenty of others.

Sure enough, these mostly instrumental numbers tread the boundaries between jazz, funk and classical genres as the orchestras each do their best to evoke the scenes that they're soundtracking.

Schifrin's On The Way To San Mateo is predictably sleek while David Shire's The Taking Of Pelham 1,2,3 is a muscular bruiser that combines bombast and mystery. Piero Umiliani's Cinque Bambole is a wonderfully jaunty bossa nova influenced piece with a haunting chorus and contrasting light-hearted verses, and thankfully the lush but somewhat anonymous strings that could have so easily dominated this album are not very prevalent, though they are glimpsed on Armando Trovajoli's Dramma Della Gelosia. Michael Colombier's "L'Heritier sounds like a Pink Floyd offshoot, the acid-drenched guitars surely soundtracking some wild drug-induced evening and it simply doesn't get an more airy and summery than Vladimir Cosma's Maldonne, which sees that wistful female voice from Since I Left You, at evoke every continental European summer you never experienced.

In fact, just about every track here screams nostalgia, but rather than evoking memories of times and places, they evoke memories of films about those places. While the casual listener may not recognise many (or any) of the tunes on this compilation, the genre is built on creating tunes that can be immediately recognised though they've never been heard before.

Alexis Buxton-Collins