Lenny Kravitz: Let Love Rule : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

These two major-label debuts capture the sound of young America sifting through the fragments of postmodern culture and creating childlike musical collages of no particular point. Everything on these albums refers to earlier styles, as if the world were a kind of shopping mall in which this type of music can be blended with that, regardless of the inherent integrity of any particular genre. The consolation for living in a time when social problems are pushing our nation to the point of collapse, these records intimate, is the freedom to play aimlessly among the ruins.

On the strength of a couple of independent releases – which were combined to create this album – Poi Dog Pondering, an Austin, Texas, band that started up in Hawaii, was highly sought after by a number of record companies hungry for the next breakthrough from the underground, à la Edie Brickell and New Bohemians. Poi dog is, evidently, Hawaiian slang for "mutt," an apparent allusion to the eclectic musical sources drawn on by the group's nine members. The songs on Poi Dog Pondering, which are largely acoustic, variously employ tin whistle, violin, guitars, trumpet, trombone, mandolin, accordion, bass, drums and a host of additional percussion instruments in arrangements that bend traditional elements to their own skewed ends.

The album's fresh instrumental combinations and hippieish good cheer are charming, though over ten tracks the novelty and unrelieved niceness wear thin. The band is at its best on relatively straightforward folkish tunes like the jaunty, Celtic-flavored "Living With the Dreaming Body" or on drifting numbers like the quietly mesmeric "Sound of Water." The droning, distortion-laden guitar and the slamming snare of "Wood Guitar" convincingly demonstrate that the Poi Dogs can also rock.

That lead singer and songwriter Frank Q. Orrall doesn't have much of a voice is, of course, beside the point; after all, this is alternative music, isn't it? The album's main problems occur when the Poi Dogs allow their eclecticism to descend into parody, as on the vapid "Aloha Honolulu," or when Orrall's lyrics take on the cloying faux-naive quality associated with bands like Camper Van Beethoven and They Might Be Giants. When Orrall and violinist Susan Voelz chant, "Breakfast, good morning everybody!/The sun's up and there's lots of toast and jelly," on the coda of "Postcard From a Dream (Toast and Jelly)," their insipidness is enough to make original hippies like the Sopwith Camel sound like Howlin' Wolf.

Of course, the sunniness of the original hippies implied a threat: The world is being redefined in visionary terms, it suggested, and the societal values currently in place are under siege. Like a smile button, the received optimism of Poi Dog Pondering, while pleasant and good-hearted, implies nothing beyond itself.

The subject of hippies, conveniently enough, leads directly to Lenny Kravitz, the man who would be Prince. When established pop stars abandon a particular style and move on to another, a vacuum is created that other performers can seek to fill. So while Prince himself diddles with second-rate commercial projects like his songs for Batman, the charts fill up with second-rate imitators of his funk style.

To his credit, Kravitz does nothing quite so crass. Instead, he zeroes in on the Sixties psychedelic sound Prince jettisoned after Parade and, in a move that might in some oblique sense constitute originality, supplements it with the roughedged spareness that characterized John Lennon in his early Plastic Ono Band period. Kravitz's obsession with control pays fitting homage to both his monomaniacal idols; he handles all lead and background vocals and plays guitar, bass, organ and drums on virtually every track on Let Love Rule.

As a lyricist, Kravitz lacks both Prince's idiosyncratic flair and, God knows, Lennon's fierce honesty and inventiveness. His fondness for the cliché ("Love is gentle as a rose/And love can conquer any war/It's time to take a stand/Brothers and sisters join hands" is the title track's opening verse) and overall heavy-handedness tend to reduce his ideas to blunt slogans.

As if compelled to self-destruct, Kravitz courts artistic disaster by continually evoking his betters. What saves him, oddly enough, in this brave, new postmodern world, is a tried-and-true rock & roll virtue: This boy can ignite a groove. He has the true musician's knack for apt details, like the tambourine that lends sizzle to the choruses on "Mr. Cab Driver" and the deliciously grungy guitar tones that transform his simple chord progressions into sonic events.

Finally, Poi Dog Pondering and Lenny Kravitz, two hot up-and-comers with much to recommend them, do little to dispel the notion that 1989 is an ongoing journey through the past. The Poi Dogs' self-conscious cleverness (the past as a subject of feckless, ingratiating irony) and Kravitz's hero worship (the past as golden age) are divergent spins on the same cultural cycle that is bringing us the Who, the Stones and any number of other reconstructed warhorses. The future looks fearsome and bleak, and in the face of difficulties that may well prove insoluble, the past seems inviting, indeed.