By now it's generally accepted that Bette Midler is more than just a pose. Her Continental Baths days long behind her, she has continued to deliver enough flashes of vocal originality to suggest a potentially seminal talent, one that has less to do with camp histrionics than with effective emotional phrasing and considerable artistic range.
Unfortunately, Midler still seems unsure of herself and too often displays a penchant for pointless excess that invariably results in her worst singing. Though she usually avoided such self-conscious rough edges on Songs for the New Depression, her last studio album, she doesn't manage quite so well on the new one. Indeed, too much of the often
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charming
Broken Blossom is rendered confusing and occasionally unpleasant by artificially revved-up endings and the aural equivalents of winking, near-leering posturing.
Midler doesn't need these devices. On such ballads as "Storybook Children," "Paradise" and even the moldy-fig standard, "La Vie En Rose," her transitions from wispiness to full-bodied emoting are intelligent, meaningful and well executed. Even when she's being deliberately campy on "Make Yourself Comfortable," she demonstrates she can soft sell humor; the scat singing here makes perfect sense.
Just as often, however, a tenderly wrought ballad will explode into gaudy overstatement. "You Don't Know Me," the Eddy Arnold/Cindy Walker country classic that became one of Ray Charles' best singles, has enough tears in its lyrics to fill a tub and needs no more than a careful, sensitive rendition. Midler's wild exercise in hand wringing does nothing but poke fun at the song, and I doubt that's what she had in mind. It just seems that sometimes Midler is so uncomfortable when she's merely singing a song that she feels compelled to revert to an earlier, cheaper style to jazz things up.
Strange as it may sound, Bette Midler is most suited, in terms of voice and perhaps even instinct, to be a conventional but characterful torch singer. If that's true, her contrivances may have something to do with where she's been, but they strike me as having little to do with who she is. (RS 258)
PETER HERBST
