While the ultra lounge cocktail bachelor pad music and design revival of the nineties has for the most part ended (I think people bought most of the vinyl and GOD that furniture’s getting expensive) Pink Martini’s sophomore effort shows that they were no bandwagon jumpers (not you could’ve really called them that anyway) despite the kitschy name and love of retro fonts.
Thomas Lauderdale and his international cast of cohorts continue the global geoquiz, with songs in French, Italian, Japanese, Croatian, Spanish and English (and why NOT, you might very well ask…), with an increase of original compositions than on the first release, SYMPATHIQUE (though you can hardly call their take on Que Sera Sera from that recording UNoriginal).
China Forbes is once again in excellent voice throughout, as is new addition Robert Taylor on the track Veronique..
One of the cooler moves PM makes is on the cover of Kikuchiyo To Mohshimasu,
where the band reconds with slide guitarist Hiroshi Wada, whose group originally recorded and released the song in Japan 40 years ago. It’s too band the Harmonicats are no longer of this earth, because they would definitely sound great with Pink Martini.
A mix of sophistication and schmaltz (I once read Bruce Handy describe Henry Mancini’s music this way and I think it also applies perfectly to Pink Martini), you could describe Pink Martini as a renaissance pop band. Clearly great fans of most music from (at least) the twentieth century, they create collections of music that sample the stylistic gamut of songs from all points of the compass with unwavering seriousness and not a drop of irony, yet they manage to avoid sounding like a musicological survey and keep each track full of spirit and energy (not an easy thing to do, especially when one takes years to make records).
And its actually a CD I can put on and not shudder if my parents also start digging it. |