Throughout his four-decade career, Mick Harvey has served as rock’s most reliable sidekick. For much of that time, he was the set designer who built the pedestal upon which Nick Cave has pranced and prowled; currently, he’s okay with being the second-most famous Harvey onstage. Even as a solo artist, he’s been most himself when singing the songs of others. Of the six albums released under his own name to date, only one has featured original material. Compared to his long-time former foil, Harvey is a cool, calm, plainspoken singer; his true voice has always come through his sense of arrangement, and his ability to render exquisite beauty and apocalyptic clamor with the same brushstroke.
On Delirium Tremens, Harvey returns to the songbook of Serge Gainsbourg, whose balance of salaciousness and sophistication was foundational to the Bad Seeds’ sound. Delirium Tremens is the third entry in a Serge-centric series that began 21 years ago with the release of Intoxicated Man and its 1997 companion Pink Elephants (the recent reissues of which inspired this new entry). For decades now, Gainsbourg has had an outsized influence on underground Anglophone musicians unlike any other Francophone performer, and it’s no mystery why: whether engaging in flirtatious pillow talk or seditious satire, his work oozes an incomparable cool and subversive spirit that obliterates any language barrier. For a sharply dressed pop star who was a fixture on the French talk-show circuit, Gainsbourg epitomized punk long before the term had been defined. He was an inappropriate fart joke dropped in the middle of a high-society party, the unshaven sleazebag who could nonetheless sweet talk the prettiest woman in the room into going home with him.
Back in the ’90s, Harvey’s Gainbourg project served a practical function: as Gainsbourg’s influence was starting to seep into the indie-rock world through bands like Stereolab, Luna, and Belle and Sebastian, Harvey’s Anglicized interpretations of his work brought a greater clarity and dimension to music that most English listeners had initially been drawn to through vibe and mystique alone. Now that Gainsbourg has been thoroughly canonized in North America and Histoire de Melody Nelson box sets can be had at Urban Outfitters, Delirium Tremens is an opportunity for Harvey to dig even deeper into Gainsbourg’s labyrinthine catalogue. Between Pink Elephants and Intoxicated Man, Harvey had already tackled Gainsbourg’s signature songs and then some. But, fitting for a collection that opens with an amped-up, psychedelized take on the 1976 art-rock oddity “The Man With the Cabbage Head” (“L’homme à Tête De Chou”), Delirium Tremens suggests there are still more layers to unpeel.
Harvey remains mostly reverential to his sacrilegious source, but Delirium Tremens is much more than just Gainsbourg fed through Google Translate. Rather, it amplifies the unsettling undercurrents that always stewed beneath Gainsbourg’s impeccable arrangements: The jazzy swing of late ’50s serenade “Deadly Tedium” (“Ce Mortel Ennui”) becomes a queasy cabaret of wobbly vibraphones; the busker-folk shuffle of “The Convict Song” (“Chanson de Forçat”) is horsewhipped into a cowpunk charge that proves, while Harvey is no longer a Bad Seed, he still has a firm grasp of their reins. But naturally, the most outrageous reinterpretation is reserved for a track from Gainsbourg’s madcap Nazi-themed send-up Rock Around the Bunker: not only does Harvey’s translation of “Est-ce Est-ce Si Bon” magnify its titular pun into “SS C’est Bon,” he delivers the song in faux-Germanic patter atop a grinding, sludge-metal goose-step. “I Envisage,” meanwhile, takes equal liberties with a song Gainsbourg originally penned for French rocker Alain Baschung, transforming its combustible post-punk rockabilly into an engrossing, cigarette-smoky set piece infused with a suffocating drone and dread.
Delirium Tremens’ second act is given over to a cluster of songs originally featured in the 1967 Anna Karina musical comedy, Anna, their thematic rumination on desire forming almost a separate album within an album. Most of these contrast Harvey with the beautifully dazed vocals of fellow Australian Xanthe Waite (of the Total Control offshoot act Terry), and their duet dynamic encourages more typical orchestral-pop and trad-rock renditions compared to the more eccentric interpretations that comprise the album’s first half. But then, such extremes are crucial to capturing Gainsbourg’s essence. As Harvey sings on “A Violent Poison (That’s What Love Is),” life is but a journey “from desire to disgust, and from disgust back to desire.” And Delirium Tremens carries out those marching orders with aplomb.
