CD - Pink Martini - Splendour In The Grass

Reviews, By Movieboy2, 4th November, 2009

“Pink Martini is like a romantic Hollywood musical of the 1940s or 50s, but with a global perspective which is modern”, says Thomas M. Lauderdale, founder and director of this Portland, Oregon-based 12-piece mini-orchestra.

Feted for their live performances around the globe (including sell-out performances in Australia), this is the group’s fourth studio recording and while it sounds effortlessly fresh and new, it does follow the lounge-pop template they have established with previous releases. If you don’t think you have heard of them before, that doesn’t necessarily mean you haven’t heard any of their music. The distinctive Pink Martini sound crops up on movie soundtracks, TV commercials and as the background tunes in many a trendy street café.

For the uninitiated, it’s tricky to describe them. This new record contains a variety of styles, including swing, bossa-nova and burlesque music-hall style numbers. Lyrics are sung in English, French, Spanish and Italian by a selection of male and female vocalists, including Sesame Street’s Emilio Delgado! He pops up on a very charming cover of Sing, as made famous by The Carpenters, sharing the mic with China Forbes, Pink Martini’s resident diva. Elsewhere, 90-year old Mexican rancheras singer Chavela Vargas crops up on a gorgeous smouldering torch-song – it’s that kind of mix.

But don’t dismiss this as camp cabaret or pastiche. The dreaded Easy-Listening tag has been applied to the group in the past, but there’s more substance here than you might imagine. If you could distill the romanticism, zaniness and high melodrama of a Pedro Almodovar movie into music, you’d get somewhere close to the Pink Martini soundscape. A myriad of influences abound – the title track alone is lyrically inspired by William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman and then mid-way through sweeps the listener up in a bit of Tchaikovsky, the whole thing underpinned by a lilting 70s pop-ballad sound.

But is this relevant to the metropolitan Same Same reader? Well, the band has its fair share of queer members and despite the traditional style of some of the tunes, there’s often a sly break from convention underpinning the whole thing. Track 10, Bitty Boppy Betty, tells of a cross-dressing DA named Billy – “After work on Fridays, off comes his neck-tie and on come her diamonds and pearls. You better get ready, ‘cos now Billy’s Betty, everybody’s favourite girl!”

Okay, this isn’t modern music in the usual sense. It’s not a CD you’re going to play at a banging party, but it is the kind of joyous stuff you can blast out while racing around with the vacuum cleaner and then lower the volume to form the classy backdrop to a romantic dinner for two.

So – if you haven’t yet discovered Pink Martini, is album 4 the right place to start? I’d say it’s as good a place as any – it’s a strong collection of songs and is entirely representative of everything they do brilliantly well. And if you take the plunge and find you like it, I guarantee you’ll be hunting down the back-catalogue anyway.

Pink Martini, Splendor in the Grass, is in stores now.

Listen to a track from Splendour In The Grass here: