Los Tremolo Kings Deliver a Lounge "Femme Fatale"

Los Tremolo Kings have made their name playing psychedelic Latin music, inspired by Peruvian chicha. Chicha leads with the distorted electric guitar and can easily sound like Latin spy movie music, but that’s not what you get from their new cover of The Velvet Underground’s “Femme Fatale.”

They take the song in a direction that Lou Reed would never have imagined when the band recorded it for their 1967 debut, The Velvet Underground and Nico. The Velvets presented a clash of artistic concepts with a heavy dose of minimalism, even in the pop-like “Femme Fatale,” where Nico’s Teutonic vocal adds an oddly tender, sympathetic quality to a lyric about a woman who toys with men’s affection.

At the time, Reed resented Nico and Andy Warhol’s efforts to insert her in the band. He didn’t want to share the vocal duties or the spotlight, but it’s easy to hear Nico’s vocal and imagine his belief that he could have given the song more depth with a more nuanced vocal.

Los Tremolo Kings remake “Femme Fatale” as Latin lounge exotica, a move that doesn’t come out of nowhere. Reed’s strumming pattern points the direction that guitarist Phil Vanderyken pursues, and the rhythm section of Doug Garrison and Rene Coman follow him into a Latin groove in a way that the Velvets’ Mo Tucker never would have.

Margie Perez’s vocals pick up the hyper-enunciated quality in Nico’s performance as well as the generally sympathetic tone toward the title subject. Reed’s melody invites that treatment, and almost all other covers are sung as reverential expressions of love for the song, including those by R.E.M. and Duran Duran. R&B singer Aloe Blacc successfully digs into the song’s story, but he gets there by taking a lot of liberties with the melody.

In the ‘80s people used to say that few people bought The Velvet Underground albums, but everybody who did formed a band. Los Tremolo Kings show how far the band’s roots have reached. During Jazz Fest, Vanderyken singled out the band’s “Heroin” as one of the songs that influenced him most. With their version of “Femme Fatale,” they’ve added a credible, unexpected take on the Velvets and the song.