02.07.2008
Spins: Shelby Lynne, Louis XIV
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Shelby Lynne
Just A Little Lovin’
Label: Lost Highway
If you like: Dusty Springfield served neat, no garnish
Song to download: “Breakfast In Bed”
3 ½ stars (out of four)
Shelby Lynne’s new album, Just A Little Lovin’, bears an aside on its cover: “Inspired By Dusty Springfield.” But this album of 10 songs — nine recorded by the late Springfield, a British pop-soul singer — is no conventional “tribute” disc.
There isn’t a hint of imitation as Lynne strips these songs to the bone, turning the album into a bastion of post-last-call cocktail intimacy. She pays homage not to Springfield’s arrangements, but to her ability to pick songs suited for personal emotional projection.
Hence, Lynne avoids the obvious — no “Son of a Preacher Man” — to instead look at the fulcrum of love through largely melancholy interpretative eyes. The lack of clutter creates space for her to put her emotional stamp onto these meticulously done songs, which range from the well-known ("The Look Of Love") to the relatively obscure ("Willie and Laura Mae Jones") to a sole Lynne composition ("Pretend").
This is Lynne at her understated best — a lesson in simple, soulful, under-expressed sadness that refuses to bend to the obvious or bow to expectation.
Louis XIV
Slick Dogs and Ponie
Label: Atlantic/Pineapple
If you like: Ziggy Stardust, Sweet, T-Rex, Queen
Song to download: “Slick Dogs And Ponies”
3 stars
Louis XIV’s debut album, The Best Little Secrets Are Kept, was an outlandish mix of droll gutter-punk guitar grind and glam indifference that focused on the sexual obsessions of singer/songwriter Jason Hill.
It rocked. It was funny, and, yes, a bit bewitching in its quest to shock with tongue in somebody’s cheek.
By comparison, the band’s new Slick Dogs and Ponies is grandiose and lush, its glam fixations amplified to a slightly less leering mix of muscle, melody and mascara. Hill’s songwriting has moved into dynamic, layered leaps of ambition, replete with harpsichords, orchestras, flute, banks of guitar than would make Queen ring a lawyer, and a heady mix of machinery and old-fashioned Jean Genie guitar grit.
Sex is still a selling point — it is a rock album — but whereas the band once seemed to have more in common with a regally impertinent New York Dolls, it now rocks a vision more in league with Roxy Music, David Bowie and Sweet. The band’s lyrics remain playfully taunting, but the newfound mix of splendor and decadence is the sound of a band evolving — and having a grand time (at your expense).