Lady Gaga & Tony Bennett

Love For Sale

It’s certainly delightful and delicious – as they croon on opening track De-Lovely – although also decidedly undemanding.

This consistently classy collection is a fine way to take a final bow.

One of the finest jazz releases in a long while, Love for Sale is a must for fans of the genre, as well as its two incomparable performers.

‘Love For Sale’ is emblematic of her incredible creative breadth, the culmination of a decade-long friendship with Tony Bennett.

This is neither an essential nor an endlessly replayable record - but what it is, thankfully, is a delightful entry point to the works of Tony Bennett. Nothing else much matters.

Where Bennett underplays (partly from necessity), Gaga likes to overplay, so their performances meet somewhere in the middle, her theatricality flirting with his restraint.

Beyond sympathy and sentiment, Love for Sale disarms cynicism simply by being infectiously good fun.

This isn't a record where the songs and arrangements are at the forefront, it's an album that's all about the show and spectacle. Its pleasures are slightly fleeting but they're pleasures all the same.

True, Bennett recorded less Cole Porter than Sinatra, but he is such an appealing character, and he can give such wonderful empathy to a lyric, that is perhaps the main joy here.

Though they’re vastly different icons, from entirely different generations, it’s testament to their power that both artists find their own voices in such timeless classics.

This ebullient album feels like a fond farewell rather than a solemn goodbye.

A superhero team-up that has produced another album of rock-solid takes on the American songbook.