My evening at the Velvet Lounge was off to a rough start. Grating keyboards, an eye-burning smoke machine, and a crowd that was just a bit too crowded for me. I turned to the dark-haired guy standing next to me, on a night when the local band Let’s French was sharing a ticket with three others, and yelled into his ear “Which band is this?” After he told me, I yelled back, “Do you know when Let’s French is going on?” The guy cocked his eyebrow at me and replies, “I’m in Let’s French.” I turn three shades of red and babble something about him not being French. And really, I should have known. My requisite internet research was done, I had checked out their pictures, listened to their music. But on a night when the three bands to go on first — including New York’s Valeze and Delaware’s The Metrosexuals, who both have a distinctly last-year-electro/new wave sound — I wasn’t sure what to expect from Let’s French or who exactly these characters would turn out to be.

Hailing from Mount Pleasant and Columbia Heights, Let’s French is comprised of Randy Chugh on lead vocals, Maxwell Sorenson on lead guitar, Matt McCoy on Drums and Tim Gibbons on Bass Guitar. With a website stating Charles De Gaulle as a collective influence, and making claims of the French exile, my interest was piqued.

When they finally came on at the Velvet Lounge’s small upstairs room, the crowd had thinned out a bit and the smoke machine’s smoke had subsided. Right off the bat I noticed the lead singer’s strong vocals. His sound is reminiscent of Interpol’s Paul Banks’, but Let’s French’s tone is more quirky and care-free. Their strongest song of the night was “Boys and Girls” and the beginning actually has a repetitive guitar lick that also sounds a bit Interpol-esque. However, the Interpol comparison ends when the background vocals kick in. They harken to the often whimsical and effervescent nature of early Beatles, and gave the song a certain innocent qauality that I quite liked.