Today, I thought we might listen to what it sounds like when Americans aspire to be Serge Gainsbourg. The one word answer: adorable. Thus, I present you to you Les Sans Culottes. It is a band out of New York that has made a whole career out of pretending to be a French rock band. So all their songs are in French and they speak with outrageous French accents. I don’t know what they do when they perform in France — which they did a few years back.

It is hard not to love the band. At least to me, they are the very definition of fun. They perform upbeat, slightly sexy, music. They are playful and often irreverent. And above all, they do not take what they do seriously, even as they perform admirably. The first song of theirs I heard was the infectious Allô Allô. You should check it out; it’s really good. But I wanted to show you something more along the lines of Gainsbourg. So below is “Les Sauvages” off their third album, Faux Realism.

The band is not terribly successful in a commercial sense. They don’t generally play more a couple dozen gigs per year — almost all of them in New York. They did do a short tour of France in 2009 and a west coast tour in 2008. No doubt as a result, they have a dizzying array of band members. Part of the problem is no doubt that I’m the kind of person who likes them: someone who doesn’t much go out to concerts. But we can enjoy their records at home. Or right here: