Grade: B
To be sexy and successful in the music industry these days takes a lot of soul selling. Clean cut, pretty boys with gelled hair and manufactured musical identities drench the radio waves. Yet Lenny Kravitz has maintained his solid sound, and to an extent, rock and roll, for over a decade with his natural sex appeal and soul intact.
His latest, simply titled Lenny, continues in the same throbbing, guitar-heavy vibe as his previous five albums. Although his level of quality may be unfamiliar to mainstream music, Kravitz is no stranger to this sound. He approaches the songs on Lenny with the “if-its-not-broke-why-stop-rockin” mentality.
“Battlefield of Love,” the album’s first track, is reminiscent of 1993’s “Are You Gonna Go My Way.” The R&B prone “Stillness of Heart,” with its sass and passion, plays like a sequel to last year’s single “Again.” Played back to back, “Again” and “Stillness” could be a continuous and seamless anthem to lost love as Kravitz croons, “I’ve got more than I can eat/ A life that can’t be beat/ Yet still I feel this heat/ I’m feeling incomplete.”
In fact, Kravitz shines the most on the slower, emotional songs of Lenny.
Perhaps inspired by the immense success of “Again,” Kravitz constructs heart-aching pseudo-ballads that could find a home on a light radio station if not for their sexy, throbbing back beats. “Believe In Me” and “A Million Miles Away” epitomize such qualities, making them the stand-out tracks of them album.
But this is not the sex symbol’s gift to candlelit diners. As evident by the first single, “Dig In,” Kravitz can still rock out and blow roofs off of house parties.
Despite colloquial lyrics like, “when the mountain is high/ Just look up to the sky/ Ask God to meet you/ Then persevere with a smile,” the dance-ability of his faster tracks is undeniable.
The pulsating “Bank Robber Man,” is at first listen a throwback to a 1950s police/rebel-themed romp. But on closer inspection, the issues of racial profiling and stereotyping are not so subtle. As Kravitz attacks the lyrics “We don’t need no reason/ You’re going in the can/ You look like the bank robber man . . . Do you think I did it just because I’m tan,” he recounts his run-in with the law last year when he was detained as a possible suspect in a Miami bank robbery.
Not surprisingly, Kravitz wrote, produced and played nearly every instrument on Lenny. His attention to detail makes for a solid sound throughout the album. The fleshy guitar chords, rich drums and grizzly, sexy vocals are a refreshing change to the lackluster sounds of most music today. In focusing so much on the album’s sound, Kravitz, never one to write the most moving prose to begin with, lets his lyrics slip. Simplistic and trite in many places, listeners must look to the rock-and-roll sound for the album’s redemption. Luckily though, they find it.
Lenny is nothing more than a good-looking, talented musician’s worthy contribution to sustaining rock and roll. Kravitz is not reinventing anything with this album, instead just helping the cause. And, in this day and age, it can use all the help it can get.