The Lady Killer by Cee-Lo

The artist currently known as Cee-Lo Green began his career in the mid-1990s, with the Atlanta-based Goodie Mob, as a rapper who sang a little. In 2000, a rapper who sang a bit more, he embarked upon a lukewarmly received solo career. Six years later, this venture was interrupted by his involvement with the highly successful Gnarls Barkley, a collaboration with DJ Danger Mouse. By this point he was a full-fledged singer who still rapped occasionally. Once the entire world lost interest in Gnarls Barkley, Cee-Lo summarily removed whatever absurd costume he might have been wearing at the time, donned a similarly absurd one, and re-embarked on a solo career, this time as a singer who didn't rap at all. Earlier in the year he released the instant classic "F*** You!" Marrying a Motown-inspired production style and melody with the artist's patented vulgar charm, it climbed to number seventeen on the American charts and number one on the British. The single heralded a reinvented and revivified Cee-Lo, for which reason expectations for his third solo effort, The Lady Killer, may be unusually high.

Unsurprisingly, the album is, for the most part, a love letter to classic Detroit soul and, accordingly, features no rapping. There are two drawbacks to Cee-Lo's reinvention: firstly, it's very difficult for Cee-Lo's producers and songwriters to contend with the likes of Holland–Dozier–Holland and The Corporation and, as a result, many tracks merely adumbrate the Motown style without it doing it any justice. Secondly, Cee-Lo isn't a great singer: at his best he sounds like Eartha Kitt, at his worst, maybe just grating and unpleasant. In some cases, producer Fraser T. Smith's liberal use of pitch correction can't even help him. Typical to this point are "Bright Lights Bigger City" and "Wild Flower". While, superficially, their ornately embellished structures suggest Motown, but neither possess a strong foundation and the compositions themselves are just as boring as most big modern pop album filler. Salaam Remi's possibly a bit too minimalistic "Bodies," whose chopped-up drum rolls invoke oddly invoke the production style of Danger Mouse, seems to lack any kind of melody and really doesn't go anywhere.

Though the silly "Love Gun" is a breath of fresh air, with its juxtaposition of spy-movie guitars and sentimental strings, it fails to gather any real momentum or linger in the listener's memory for more than a few seconds. Of course, none of the aforementioned tracks could be described as inauthentic, and their producers, Cee-Lo included, deserve credit for tirelessly and scrupulously crafting an undeniably retrograde atmosphere, but little else. It should be mentioned that the copious use of auto-tune on certain tracks creates a kind of cognitive dissonance in the listener given the album's diametrically opposed nostalgic inclinations, invoking the Motown of a parallel 1960s in which phase vocoder technology had already become the industry standard: surely a dystopic vision for fans of classic soul–presumably this album's key demographic.

"Satisfied", "Cry Baby" and "It's OK" are fairly decent but unspectacular would-be singles, but "I Want You" is, like "F*** You!", absolutely flawless, one of the best things Cee-Lo has ever done, and one of a few tracks on The Lady Killer that find his pastiche method transcending mere cheeky parody to serve an actual semiotic function. As Cee-Lo was undoubtedly raised with and therefore socialized by means of classic love songs, his invocation here of their familiar tropes serves to express genuine romantic notions as fermented by a history of pop-music spectatorship. The possibility of "I Want You" constituting actual commentary serves elevates the track to the level of a postmodern artistic statement, while most of the album's tracks founder in the godless murky depths of cuteness and blank parody.