Lenny Kravitz: It Is Time For A Love Revolution : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

As a blast back to the past, this is the best album Lenny Kravitz has ever made — a visceral, expertly tailored blend of late-Sixties and early-Seventies classic-rock paraphrases with just enough modernizing to justify the record's copyright date. "Love Love Love" is a Red Hot Chili Peppers-style thump, and for a stretch in "A Love Revolution," Kravitz's scrappy, compressed vocal sounds like a phone-machine message left by the Strokes' Julian Casablancas. Otherwise, the reverberations are of vintage stock: the mix of David Bowie's "Fame" and the Rolling Stones' Goats Head Soup in "Dancin' Till Dawn"; the chunks of Led Zeppelin and Grand Funk Railroad in the riff shrapnel and people's-rock hurrah in "Bring It On." The pastiche works best when Kravitz roughs up the history with fuzz bass, rusted-harmony guitars and near-monophonic production. That also helps you get past the formula in Kravitz's calls to love and revolt. "If you want it/You can change your world today/If you want it/Just break free/And walk away," he sings in "If You Want It," a self-help country-soul ballad that sounds like it was written in 1971 by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Steve Marriott and John Lennon — except none of those writers, in their prime, would have let a rhyme that dry make it past the demo stage.