THEY LOVE THE EIGHTIES
For almost a decade, musicians have been borrowing things from the nineteen-eighties: haircuts, synthesizers, shoes. But, until now, acts haven’t borrowed that many songs.

In 2004, a French band called Nouvelle Vague—the producers Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux—released a self-titled album of eighties hits performed by singers whose first language was not English, and who had never heard the songs they were assigned to sing. The results were diverting within a narrow stylistic range; the songs, whether originally by Depeche Mode or the Buzzcocks, became frisky bossa novas. For their wonderful second album, “Bande à Part” (Luaka Bop), the aesthetic has been widened beyond Brazilian sounds, though the arrangements remain acoustic. When the Cramps released “Human Fly,” in 1979, it was a campy sci-fi joke rendered as fuzzy garage rock. Nouvelle Vague turn the song into slinky cabaret. The singer coos as she sings “buzz buzz” and “I’m an unzipped fly,” a bit like Marilyn Monroe, but without the pose of innocence, and backed by the band from Tom Waits’s “Rain Dogs.”

With less success, the singer Grant-Lee Phillips addresses the same decade in “nineteeneighties” (Zoë), a collection of covers that turns a sombre song like Joy Division’s “The Eternal” into an equally grim affair, but with more harmonica. It is Joy Division who have written the eighties standard that everyone attempts and nobody can entirely ruin. That song is “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” and it was the linchpin of the first Nouvelle Vague album, a light samba that turned the ache of a failed romance into an unpleasant memory that, several cocktails later, might be gone. Susanna & the Magical Orchestra, from Norway, play the song on their new album, “Melody Mountain” (Rune Grammofon), as if everything but the memory were gone, reducing the song to a slow, defeated voice singing over two piano figures. The version that Ian Curtis would have had the hardest time imagining is Albert Kuvezin & Yat-Kha’s version from their album “Re-covers” (World Village). Kuvezin practices Tuvan throat singing, a technique that creates growling tones several octaves below normal singing. Because Kuvezin’s accent is heavy and his feel for the song’s emotional peaks questionable, the song often sounds like Borat with a very bad cold, and it is hard to hear this version as anything other than a novelty. But when Kuvezin simply hums along with Curtis’s melody, the song reasserts itself, proving that when the eighties pass back into history, “Love” will remain.