Mick Harvey: Pink Elephants

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 blow jobs. 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. The slow, rhythmic dance of "I Love You… Nor Do I" (also covered by Bad Seeds alumnus Barry Adamson) is punctuated by Anita Lane's breathy vocals and sex-moans, and the lyrics, "I go, I go and I come / inside of you my love / …together we are one." Gainsbourg's anti-drug ode "To All The Lucky Kids" takes on a heavy layer of irony sung by Harvey, as it would be hard to have served as a long-time associate of Cave without a cursory familiarity with chemical experimentation. 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.