Momus: The Little Red Songbook

Few things are more disturbing than a literate pervert. What makes novels like Naked Lunch and Lolita, movies like Happiness, and songwriters like Serge Gainsbourg so playfully subversive is their placement of sex, sleaze, and degeneracy in a high-brow context. Nick Currie, who records as Momus, surely knows what he's doing when he titles a song on his new The Little Red Songbook "Coming In A Girl's Mouth." The lyric is as clever as it is tasteless, the tune itself a discoid ditty that sounds almost regal. But the details are in is Currie's almost giggly delivery, as if he knows just how ridiculous his song is, title and all. Few artists have the guts to dose their music with so much irony, and searching Momus' straight-faced songs for an inkling of sincerity proves fruitless. Currie's droll wit is certainly aligned with Neil Tennant (of Pet Shop Boys) and Stephin Merritt (of The Magnetic Fields), but even those ardent Momus admirers can write earnest love songs without having their intent questioned. Yet Currie has made it pretty clear that he doesn't really care about putting too much of himself in his songs; that much has been made apparent by his interest in writing songs for other performers, like the reigning queen of kitschy Japanese pop, Kahimi Karie. With its pop-culture name-dropping (Kurt Cobain, Bob Dylan, Princess Diana, MC Escher, transgender keyboard pioneer Walter/Wendy Carlos, et al) and its synth-Baroque arrangements, The Little Red Songbook is a good dollop of deviant fun, full of foppish ditties so silly, they belie their intelligence. For karaoke fans, Currie includes instrumental versions of half the songs so you can sing along. (Le Grand Magistery, P.O. Box 611, Bloomfield Hills, MI 48303)