Punishing Kiss

THIS ONE was always going to be an event. Take an award wining actress/singer - one of Germany's leading exponents of Weimar Republicanism and the French chanson tradition - give her a ream of songs by Elvis Costello, Nick Cave, Neil Hannon, Tom Waits, Philip Glass, Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill amongst others, assign Joby Talbot the arranging chores, recruit most of The Divine Comedy as house band and allow Scott Walker and Hal Willner to produce a brace of tracks . . .. this writer was halfway sold without hearing a note.

However, initial listenings were qualm-ridden. Firstly, this is no grotty arthouse production - the budget for the videos and Vogueish photo shoot smells immense, and much of the album operates on an epical scale rather than the Amarcord-on-a-shoestring ambience one might've expected. The colour scheme here is roaring red velvet, not flea market charcoal.

And then there's Lemper's theatrically enunciated vocal style, which comes off as a little too stagey for tunes like Cave's 'Little Water Song' (another drowned-girl ballad, this time written from the p.o.v. of the victim, replete with a surreal lyric and minimalist melody that suggest Lorca writing for Bjork).

Elsewhere though, her fiery warble is well matched by Costello's acidic wordplay in the Bacharach-ian 'Passionate Fight' and on Brecht/Weill's sarcastic whorehouse hymn 'Tango Ballad', plus a whole fistful of classy tunes from the Comedians' camp, most notably 'The Case Continues' (Chandler set to Cole Porter, backlit by the kind of flaming string arrangement which set Sinead's 'Troy' a blazing).

Throughout the album, Talbot outdoes himself with a succession of window-dressings that evoke everyone from Pulp to Bowie to David Arnold, while Lemper deploys her best Fassbinder sensibilities on Philip Glass' magnificent 'Streets Of Berlin' (taken from Martin Sherman's play Bent), or alternatively, receives direction from Scott Walker on the ten-minute 'Scope J', singing "in a delirious state of mind, similar to Ophelia's in Hamlet" (her words, not mine).

In the end, Punishing Kiss is a little too self-consciously leather 'n' peroxide to compare with cult cabaret classics like Gavin's 'Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves' or Bowie's Baal EP or Walker Sings Brel, but for all of that, it's pretty compelling stuff.