Les Sans Culottes

The giddy, light-headed charm of the 1960's French rock known as ye-ye is concept enough for Les Sans Culottes, a Brooklyn band that revives the style. Campiness is virtually built into the fuzz-toned guitars, electric organ, cooing female voices and know-it-all male growls. All Les Sans Culottes had to do is bring back the psychedelic-patterned clothes, come up with stage names like Kit Kat le Noir and add some extra Franglais to savor the music's loony essence. - John Pareles

Les Sans Culottes. Loosely translated as "Those Without Undergarments," this Brooklyn-based septet performs picture-perfect Parisian ye-ye—the sassy, sparkly equivalent of American go-go music—in French, with a profusion of feather boas, silk scarves, and below-the-belt attitude. - Silke Tudor

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, just like the terrific backup singers do (and by terrific, yes, we mean hot). - Mike Wolf

It takes a special strand of rock & roll quirk — or is it lunacy — to be an American-born band but sing in French. Yet the seven hipsters in Les Sans Culottes (“Those Without Undergarments”) may just pull it off.... And on Fixation Orale, their fourth proper album, the Brooklyn-based septet bops through twelve tightly-wound guitar-songs that might otherwise be Kinks-like, if it weren't for all the French. As it is, this sharp pop is ironically inventive and totally fun. Swirling keyboards and airy, toe-tapping rhythms flutter around boy-girl harmonies that discuss “menage a toi’s” and ice cream. Sill, though, it's near impossible not to snicker at the band and wonder if they're for real. Perhaps some questions are better left unanswered. - Benjamin Friedland

In Les Sans Culottes, Francophiles have found their B-52’s. Not since singer France Gall pranced her way through “Teenie Weenie Boppie” in the late ’60s has French pop sounded so danceable and infectious. And to think such revelry comes from a Brooklyn band whose name, which once referred to 18th-century French revolutionaries, now translates as “Those Without Undergarments.” - Globe Staff

Fixation Orale is a wildly diverse experience, melding together French pop, surreal kids’ music, earnest passion, and ironic distance. The disc rocks, races, echoes, shouts, and harmonizes, with alternating sex-kitten vocals and garage-rock growls, and the minute you sink into one mood—giving in to the seduction, humor, or over-the-top keyboards — the mood shifts and the record undercuts itself with a lilting melody or a moment of driving rock’n’roll. A lot of the songs have a great dialogue quality, and you can almost hear the chemistry between the band members as they sing or banter—always in bad French. But strangely, the unfamiliar language doesn’t seem to matter much, as the lyrics themselves are secondary to the performance and playfullness of it all. More than anything else, Fixation Orale just makes me want to pull on my boots and dance like a vinyl-clad, go-go dancing Bond girl. And that’s good, n’est-ce pas? - Laurel Snyder

The Brooklyn ensemble Les Sans Culottes play raunchy faux-French rock and roll that's both a sendup of and a tribute to the dark tunes of late-period Serge Gainsbourg and punchy ye-ye girl pop. - Night Life