"I'm the minister for rock'n'roll," shrieks Lenny Kravitz in the Black Sabbath-esque opener to this, his seventh studio album. It is 15 years since his critically-acclaimed debut, Let Love Rule, and Kravitz has headed straight for the comfort zone with another of his CDs by numbers.
All the usual suspects are here, some guitar-parading rock, melancholic ballads (Calling All Angels and Baptized fighting it out in the loveliness stakes), with the only surprise being a nod to the Beach Boys on the surf-rocking California.
Fans will find Lenny on fine form here, while detractors will wonder if he will ever emerge from the shadow of Hendrix to be his own rock god.
Alanis Morissette had her rock royalty coronation with her massive breakthrough album Jagged Little Pill, which cast her as the original angry young female songwriter. Many pretenders have come since, but Morissette still manages to wear her crown, despite having turned down the aggro-volume a notch or two. The guitar thrashing is muted somewhat by folksy vocals at times and is an odd bedfellow to a helping of Bollywood bangra on the infectious opener Eight Easy Steps.
Hey, she's even got a sense of humour in Knees Of My Bees, a quirky tribute to her fella. The title song returns us to the world of angst, with a tortured vocal and torment in the lyric: 'I want to be naked running through the streets, I want to invite this so-called chaos that you think I dare not be.' In sum, a softer Morissette, but still with a jagged edge.
Updated: 08:43 Thursday, June 03, 2004
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