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 (Counter/Inertia)
Patchy but intermittently brilliant second album from Liverpool-via-LA pop maven
Pop Levi’s 2006 debut The Return To Form Black Magick Party was a welcome, rocked-up blast of pure pop, its commingling of T-Rex, Donovan and Prince with a healthy dose of blues rock hardly groundbreaking but nonetheless unique at the time thanks to Levi’s studied cultivation of rock star mystique and his knack with a killer pop melody. If nothing else, it was refreshing to hear a musician sounding like he was actually having fun. That sense of mischief carries over to Pop’s newie Never Never Love, though, to his credit, he’s been careful not to repeat himself, ditching the crunchy guitars and neo-psych haze of Return in favour of an audacious embracing of Japanese culture – its sights, sounds, gadgets, and most of all its music. Hence this is a much a more electronic album, full of dinky, karaoke-like synth bleeps blended with a harder undercurrent of electronic funk clearly indebted to 1999-era Prince. When the combo works, the result is close to pop perfection – witness the audacious mix of hip-hop beats, brittle synth burbles, and, er, Cher’s vocoder that is the addictive title track, and the sleazy mechanoid pop-funk of Dita Dimoné – but when it doesn’t, mostly on slower songs like You Don’t Gotta Run, with its parping ‘80s synth horns, the results give of the distinctive whiff of fromage. Plus, the lyrics are often ridiculously banal, even for pop songs – hanging on a thread / like the words you said / the moment that you read / from the paper you had on your double bed etc – clearly Pop only bothers with words because he needs to something to sing. Still, Never Never Love is a much more adventurous and original album than its predecessor, and its highlights are some of the best pure pop you’ll hear all year. Whether, in the long run, Levi has what it takes to become the Prince-like pop maverick he so clearly aspires to be, it’s hard to say, but I for one hope he does.
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BRETT COLLINGWOOD
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