Mick Harvey – Pink Elephants – LP –
Art Rock – French Chanson – Lounge – Serge Gainsbourg Covers Album

Mick Harvey is best known for his long-time collaboration with Nick Cave in The Bad Seeds, as well as The Birthday Party before that, and less known for his soundtrack work for independent foreign films. Serge Gainsbourg is a dead pop star who, legend has it, once caught Whitney Houston off-guard on live French television by telling her she had a perfect mouth for [insert your own phrase]. That vignette is the essence of Gainsbourg: smarmy, inappropriately sexual, and unfalteringly iconoclastic.

Pink Elephants is Harvey’s second album in which he sings the songs of Gainsbourg in English. Considering the dark tone of Harvey’s better-known work, the record consists of surprisingly straightforward, light orchestral pop, much of which borders on smooth jazz. Smooth jazz should sound so sexy. If the music is smooth, Gainsbourg’s lyrics are not, even in translation. While Pink Elephants could easily be embraced by followers of lounge music’s renaissance, the record is more than a smarmy hipster hoist of the glass to debaucherous days gone by. Harvey’s reworkings may not stray far from the originals, but Gainsbourg’s music doesn’t need a radical reworking. It just needs a wider audience, and Harvey should be commended for his efforts to spread the Gainsbourg word. [jgarden, avclub, 2002].

Listen to full album here.

Tracklist

• Pink Elephants
• Requiem …
• The Javanaise
• Black Seaweed
• Comic Strip
• The Ticket Puncher
• Non Affair
• To All The Lucky Kids
• Manon
• I Love You … Nor Do I
• Scenic Railway
• Anthracite
• The Ballad Of Melody Nelson
• Torrey Canyon
• Who Is “In” Who Is “Out”
• Hotel Specific