Luscious Jackson
Electric Honey
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Luscious Jackson
Electric Honey
Grand Royal, 1999
RiYL: Blondie, Beastie Boys, Cibo Matto, Beck |
But two albums and a side project later, the band's cute-white-girls-playing-soul schtick has worn thin, to the point that barely half the songs on Electric Honey get the body moving like records past. The album's studio slickness is nothing new, but here any semblance of true funkiness gets slathered over by horn licks, uneventful keyboards, gurgling electronic beats and a faux-disco groove straight out of Donna Summers' lost luggage. Even A-list guests like Daniel Lanois, N'dea Davenport, Emmylou Harris and Josephine Wiggs add little to the proceedings.
Electric Honey, the band's first record without keyboardist Vivian Trimble, gets off to a good start with the thumping and melodically interesting "Nervous Breakthrough." We've got all the band's trademarks here: Jill Cunniff's sexy voice, Gabby Glaser's husky rapping and a beat with a firm grip on the posterior.
"Ladyfingers" is next, perhaps the band's finest moment since Natural Ingredients' "Deep Shag." Atop a seductive vocal, Cunniff fashions a fantastic guitar melody kicked into high gear by a propulsive chorus: "I've got ladyfingers, baby / I've got kid gloves / Baby, I've got heart." Who knows what the hell it means, but it sure sounds great. Even "Christine" overcomes its lack of development with an angelic chorus and Glaser's nimble-fingered bassline.
But that's about where the fun ends. Luscious Jackson's lyrical content has always been somewhat secondary to its party-ready groove (the songs never really seem to be about anything), but the empty phrases are a lot more noticeable this time around -- particularly on the well-intentioned but bland "Friends".
Moreover, the disco flavors cause the songs to simply run together into a shallow puddle of funk-lite. Tracks like "Summer Daze" and "Alien Lover" sound okay, but quickly exhaust the formula of funky beats, weird noises and come-hither singing. A harder edge can't mask the inherent mediocrity and lyrical silliness of "Sexy Hypnotist" or the new-wave reject "Devotion," just as guest vocals from Blondie's Debbie Harry add little but an air of her own band's olde-time crunchy pop to "Fantastic Fabulous."
One of the band's strongest suits is its knack with melody, but the cool riffs that Cunniff summons on "Beloved" and "Country's A Callin'" are that and that only: cool riffs unaccompanied by a worthwhile vocal melody. Where was the executive editor on this one, the director of quality control? 15 tracks are about five too many for a band whose songs vary so little from song to song.
Truthfully, Luscious Jackson at its most undistinctive is way more listenable than the rest of the garbage on the radio these days. But Electric Honey is still highly uninspired, and from a band that had previously been so easy to enjoy, it's a huge letdown.
JONATHAN COHEN | Jonathan Cohen co-created Nude As The News with his Indiana University mates Troy Carpenter and Ben French. When not traversing the globe for business and pleasure, he holds down the fort as a senior editor for Billboard in New York. Stop him and he just may ask, "what for lunch?"