Intoxicated Women

As with any Harvey project, the musicianship is of the highest, yet understated, order.

Like Serge Gainsbourg’s contrarian career as a whole, there are lot of hidden profundities and canny pleasures to decipher and uncover here. This makes Intoxicated Women a dense yet rewarding affair, which should satisfy and intrigue hardcore Mick Harvey fans and Sergeologists alike for some time.

Harvey sends off his final Gainsbourg project with the same spirit he introduced it with: savvy, humor, and an illuminating musical and literary spirit that defies anyone to follow him. Ultimately, it's perhaps the only kind of tribute Gainsbourg could--or would--accept.

Intoxicated Women makes you fall in love with Gainsbourg and his women all over again. [Dec 2016, p.95]

In short: superb. [Dec 2016, p.106]

Following much beauty and polymorphous perversity, the climactic take on Histoire De Melody Nelson's "Cargo Cult" is a fittingly epic finale. [Dec 2016, p.30]

Like Gainsbourg’s music as a whole, there’s too much going on here to do justice to the collection’s many layers.

With Intoxicated Women we don’t get starlets and a known bad boy tussling in the spotlight. We get Harvey and his cast of players dusting off old scripts of prior perversions, delivering them to a world that fancies itself jaded, but is just as confused as ever.

It's jauntier, if still jaundiced, and contains some of Gainsbourg's best compositions. [No. 138, p.57]

The creepier explorations of infantile eroticism--the lollipop metaphor of “All Day Suckers”, the fairytale allusion of “Baby Teeth, Wolfy Teeth”--are voiced by Harvey himself, allowing guest singers like Jess Ribeiro and Sophia Brous to indulge the sweeter romanticism of songs such as “The Eyes To Cry” and “Prevert’s Song”, where Gainsbourg’s musing on the poet’s work prompts a moving reflection on transitory love.