Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited (CD Tribute)

 

Sound: B-     Music: C-

 

 

When I come to a Serge Gainsbourg record, I’ll admit, I have certain, possibly unfair but certainly understandable, expectations.  Serge is the Gallic king of the louche and lascivious.  I expect a record that drips with various and sundry effluvia of the most carnal nature.  I expect sex.  And not the polite, civil sex of early Beatles records.  Serge never wants to hold the girl’s hand. He has other, more acrobatically inventive uses for her fingers and every other part of her body.

 

I expect to feel kind of dirty and sticky after listening to Gainsbourg.  I expect, due entirely to my catholic upbringing, to feel somewhat ashamed and in need of the nearest confessional.  After the needle slides from the final track and off the vinyl on a Gainsbourg record I swear it sounds like a zipper going up.  When Serge is done with you your whole body cries out for a cigarette.

 

Gainsbourg records are like that.

 

Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited, however, is nothing like that at all.  From the first track onward it’s closer to a cold shower than to the weird, erotica typically associated with the man.

 

Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited is yet another tired example of the ever ubiquitous, entirely formulaic, tribute album.  The root problem with this record is that the producers have almost exclusively engaged the services of artists who are completely un-sexy.  Michael Stipe?  Franz Ferdinand?  Cat Power?  Feist?  I enjoy their own work, but here they just don’t have it to bring anything interesting to the table.  The songs sound thin and intellectualized.  There’s no heat.

 

Several of the artists are spot on.  Marianne Faithfull, Jarvis Cocker, Jane Birkin, Marc Almond, and Francoise Hardy are all denizens of the Gainsbourg demimonde in their own right.  Sadly the production is so thin and trebly on all of these tracks that the music never hits you in the gut, or for that matter anywhere lower on your body.

 

 

-   Kristofer Collins

 

 

Kristofer Collins is an editor at The New Yinzer and owner of Desolation Row CDs in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  You can contact him through our staff list or at:

 

desolationrowcds@hotmail.com