Album Review: The Hot Sardines “French Fries & Champagne” Is Musically Delicious
The Hot Sardines literally live in the Jazz Age. From their first song, Running Wild, you feel like you have journeyed to the times where flapper dresses, drinking morning martinis, and doing the Charleston were ordinary, daily things. That ability to casually capture an era through music is what makes their newest album, French Fries and Champagne, a must have for jazz lovers and anyone whom dreams of living in a Great Gatsby World.
There is nothing modern, edgy, or reinvented about their sound, which is why it is amazing. It is pure jazz in its unadulterated essence. The horn, piano arrangements are so vibrant that if they do not leave you moving than they will leave you with a vision of “old-world” glamor and bliss. This album represents the liberating sentiment of jazz and the escapism it offers. It is a genre that makes you close your eyes and sway into “champagne” dreams. Hence, lead singer “Miz Elizabeth” Bougerol comes off like a dream fairy, with a cool voice that could lull and incite any passion.
Bourgerol’s voice promotes spiritual and bodily empowerment through its inherent sultriness. For some celestial reason, her voice makes you feel confident in being a sensual being. It is not that this album is R-Rated. On the contrary, it promotes love and personal, starry-eyed freedom through thoughtful, even innocent, lyrics. The Hot Sardines’ words are aimed at reaching the purity of emotions in the same way their music is aimed at attaining the purity of jazz. Even their covers, Addicted To Love, manage to bring a coy lightness to this sexualized track. Their ability to strip down music to its “bare bones” is quintessential to jazz’s strength as music. Jazz is simple in sound but vast in its orchestrations of humanity, which is essentially what French Fries and Champagne achieves as a album.
When you hear that trumpet go off, it is like the Hot Sardines are beckoning you to join them. Running wild is the perfect blast of energy to introduce a surprisingly quiet, romantic album. As previously mentioned, Bourgerol’s voice is simmering with vigor and comfort in cooing audiences to stay in the record’s present, “jazzy” dream. Although there are songs with unavoidable “dance” vibe like, When I get Low I Get High (feat Alan Cumming), there is also a sweet beauty to its takes on love and life. French Fries and Champagne, similarly titled to the album, is one of my favorite tracks. Bandleader Evan “Bibs” PalazzoIt has created music so softly stunning, it makes you think you are walking through Paris as angels serenade and fly over. Bibs designs music to be calm “uppers” like, Sweet Pea and Weed Smoker’s Dream. These songs turn the “everydayness” of life into grand odysseys, which is why they boost positivity through one listen. Overall. there are several moments throughout the record that are musical embodiments of “pretty”. For instance, “Gramercy Sunset” can enrapture any listener with its violin compositions. They are so entrancing you wonder if you can literally feel what is “falling in love” through song.
Hot Sardines’ French Fries And Champagnes is too perfect for jazz lovers. If someone told me that
the album time-traveled to its release date, June 17, I would sincerely believe it. I love when music makes you happily dream and fantasize of yourself in a different, better world and time. We all should give ourselves permission to imagine, and the Hot Sardines’ do so in this album. To Buy The Album and Learm More About The Hot Sardines’ Click Here.
