Is there another pop superstar who blurs the lines between mega-watt likability and platinum blond vacuousness with as much joie de vivre as Gwen Stefani? Try as I might in vain to hate her, but the truth is, I love her and all the blissful band camp dorkiness that she encompasses. Well, at the least, I can settle on our relationship skewing love/hate because she makes being utterly annoying the car wreck I can't help but rubberneck for a peek.

Case in point: Lead single "Wind It Up", championed by frat girls coast to coast who've had one too many shots of Jagrmeister and should be in a taxi on their way to bed but instead choose to channel their inner Coyote Ugly for passed out bar patrons instead. As radio singles go, it's an absurd-sounding concoction that lederhosens to the brink of utter ridiculousness, but there's something almost admirable about this "throw the wackiest shit on the wall and let's see if it sticks" approach. I mean, let's be real...this is limburger cheese, not War & Peace. It takes a certain sort of quirky finesse to mine show tunes for inspiration, first with Fiddler On The Roof and now in full Swiss Miss glory with The Sound of Music. What's next? West Side Story? Unlike most singers, Stefani aims to please with style over sex appeal and oddity reigns supreme. Early Winter is probably the closest to her past rumblings with No Doubt, scaling above indie-rock, college radio circa '88 to epic power ballad heights with an assist from co-writer, Keane's Tim Rice-Oxley. But you'd better off advised to fast forward through filler like Orange County Girl, in which the SoCal sweetheart gets all Jenny From The Block to prove "a lot of things have changed but I'm mostly the same." Uh huh.

Listening too closely will only force you to confront lyrics that were obviously jotted down in her DayTimer instead of her diary en route to the Beat Factory and never looked at again ("Don't know what I'm doing back in the studio/Getting greedy cause he said he had another sick flow/So I had to hollaback cause I didn't get enough/Still feel the Wonderland, Alice and the tick tock"). But if you just slip on your tortoiseshell J.Lo sunglasses, pour yourself a Smirnoff Twisted and get lost in the beats, The Sweet Escape delivers on its name and continues in Stefani's proud tradition of being caught in the middle between the vanguard and the superficial. Few mainstream artists can hope to produce an album as effortlessly eccentric as this, so here's to hoping that the next screwball chapter is just around the bend.




Rating:

Download this: Early Winter, Now That You Got It, Yummy, 4 In The Morning, Fluorescent, U Started It, Don't Get It Twisted

Labels: album review, Gwen Stefani, music

When F. Scott Fitzgerald opined that there were no second acts in American life, he clearly never envisioned a whirling dervish of blond ambition from Bay City, Michigan. Boy toy. Material girl. Culture vulture. The world's most famous Kabbalist. Madonna has had more lives than your average Siamese in her 22-year reign as the Queen of Pop. For all her chameleonic shape shifting throughout decades past, her connection to the lullaby of clubland never waned. And after she struck an ill-advised Patty Hearst pose on 2003's disappointing American Life, a return to the frothy glory days of plastic bangles and strobe lit nights not only seemed like a logical retreat but also as a necessary tactic to restore the platinum luster to her distinguished chart stats.

If American Life was for the head, Confessions On A Dance Floor is strictly meant for the feet. However, while music critics by and large have given an overall enthusiastic thumbs up (Entertainment Weekly's Michael Slezak may quite possibly kickstart the first male menstrual cycle with his finger snapped salute to COADF on PopWatch) to Confessions, I wasn't quite ready to take my vintage pair of Sergio Valentes out of storage to party like it was 1985 all over again. I suppose this is the part where I should renounce my platinum fag hag membership because I dared to back away from the altar of Our Lady of Ciccone, but for an album designed to coax the party-girl-gone-astray out of me, I felt like a wallflower for longer than expected while tuned in.

Moving away from the aristocratic English pretension of her current Lady Madonna incarnation and back into the darkened jungle where she's always been most at home, the first three tracks come at you with the fury of a disco inferno and are worthy of instant repeat value. The first single, "Hung Up" is a delectable slice of heaven which owes much of the frenetic BPM's to ABBA's 1979 campy chestnut "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)." The constant clock ticking which seems to be a concurrent theme throughout blends into the blurry soundscape of the Stardust-inspired "Get Together." Rounding out the amplified trifecta is an litany of multilingual apologies which picks up the pace yet again as "Sorry" pounds with a driving bassline courtesy of the Jackson's "Can You Feel It."

The problems begin when she starts to drift from the guilty pleasures of merely shaking your ass down to the ground to the overwhelming need to spout off more empty truisms with a "deeper meaning." On the dubiously titled "Let It Will Be," Madge gets all E! True Hollywood Story on us with a spiffy opener: "Now I can tell you about success, about fame/About the rise and the fall of all the stars in the sky..." Sound familiar? It should, the rehash was detailed ad nauseum on "Drowned World/Substitute For Love" 7 years ago. Haven't we had all the inner peace/ethereal reference bases covered since she spit out her litter of rugrats and allegedly gained a conscience? If I hear one more allusion to light, I may just need to indulge in a bit of erotic asphyxiation with a red string bracelet. And in her tongue-in-cheek ode to the city that never sleeps has even more embarrassing dialogue than her last children's book: "I don't like cities, but I like New York/Other places make me feel like a dork."

British DJ/remixer Stuart Price a.k.a. Jacques Du Cont (of Les Rhythmes Digitales) was brought in this time around as the main collaborator and his productions swathes each cut with dizzying pace and dense production. The LP was mixed as a throwback to older disco EP's which flowed seamlessly from one song to another irregardless to track numbers. However, the digital bells and whistles could've benefited from less trendy techno posturing and simply more percussion of the traditional house variety. This merely seems like window dressing as opposed to some of her latter-day gems which winked and nodded to the joys of rediscovering the groove on Impressive Instant, Nothing Really Matters and Thief Of Hearts with ease.

In her attempt to prove that she can still hang out with the raver kids past a yoga mama's scheduled curfew, it only makes me long for the sugar rush of her early classics all the more. A time when she believed in power of the beat and remaining under the DJ's spell would save the world. And when she used to dance... for inspiration.

Rating:
Download this: Hung Up, Get Together, Sorry, Forbidden Love, Push, Jump

Labels: album review, Madonna, music, new CD