After the incredible success of their debut self-titled album, The Hot Sardines return to the spotlight with a new album entitled French Fries + Champagne. While the new album continued to show the Paris-meets-New York backgrounds of the band’s leaders, vocalist Miz Elizabeth and pianist Evan Bibs Palazzo, French Fries + Champagne illustrates the duality of the Hot Sardines ethos.

On one side, they are a rollicking, lowbrow, gutbucket R&B and hot jazz band, who love to let the good times roll, reveling in the simple pleasures of a good plate of fried food and a sizzling foot-stomper from the ’40s and ’50s American South. On the other Champagne side, the Sardines are the elegant, smooth, soft and luxurious lovers of lush orchestral arrangements of ballads about newfound love, loss and loneliness.

Tracks range from “Running Wild,” the hit from the 1959 Billy Wilder classic rom-com, Some Like It Hot starring Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, to “People Will Say We’re In Love,” from the 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway smash, Oklahoma! There’s even a jazzy version of the 1985 smash pop hit, “Addicted To Love,” made famous by the late British blue-eyed soul singer Robert Palmer and the Power Station.

A surefire highlight of the album is “When I Get Low, I Get High.” Originally recorded in 1936 by Ella Fitzgerald and Chick Webb and His Orchestra, the Lindy Hop sensation is here now interpreted Sardines-style by Miz Elizabeth dueting with the Tony Award-winning (Cabaret), two time Emmy and Golden Globe nominee (The Good Wife), Alan Cumming.