k.d. lang: “Even Cowgirls Get The Blues” (Sire/Warner Bros)

YOU HAVE to hand it to k.d. lang and her collaborator Ben Mink. After the deeply personal elegance, emotion and, of course, commercial success of Ingenue it would have been very easy indeed for both Mink and lang to take an artistic holiday and casually churn out the reliable formulae of previous recordings for this, the soundtrack for Gus Van Sant’s film of the Tom Robbins’ 1976 Zen rock and roll novel about a young girl from small town America who finds herself endowed with two extremely large thumbs and decides to utilise, rather than hide, her freakishness by becoming a hitchhiker extraordinaire.

Whether it is due to the heroine’s courageous disinclination for dissimulation or simply down to lang’s confessed love of movies, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues unrepentantly shrugs off any temptation to take the vulgar road to artistic laziness and can justifiably be ranked as k.d.’s sixth LP and maybe even her best yet.

Lang’s vocal performances plough the same Burt Bacharach and Peggy Lee territory as her previous bouquet of country laureled ballads, though tracks like the silkily seductive ‘Hush Sweet Lover’, the trans-European locomotive jazz of ‘Lifted by Love’ and the funky bohemianism of ‘Just Keep Me Moving’, as if inspired by the therapeutic exorcism of similar themes on Ingenue, are, perhaps, even more assured than anything Ms lang has produced before.

However, the real revelations here are the ‘instrumental’ compositions, mostly classically based yet never a million miles from the white bar-room blues of C&W, every facet of which idiom lang and Mink run through with the greatest of ease. From the hoedown yip yip horraying of ‘Don’t Be A Lemming Polka’ and ‘Cowgirl Pride’ to the fireside 1940’s yodelling of ‘Sweet Little Cherokee’, it is the predominantly musical portraits which strike genuinely innovative poses.

The test, I suppose, for all soundtracks is whether or not they stand up as credible performances independent of the movie for which they were written. As far as that goes Even Cowgirls Get The Blues definitely scores a wholehearted ‘thumbs up’. And then, like all great adventurers, it goes a helluva lot further again. Read the novel and roll on the movie!

• Patrick Brennan