Well, Pop Levi is proof that a pop musician can be extremely talented, and weird, but not necessarily interesting. This anachronistically mop-topped, blouse-and-kimono-sporting former member of jack-of-all-Can-assed-trades Super Numeri remains sort of an answer to the pointless late-night rock-crit stoner query, "Dude, what if Devendra Banhart were Liverpudlian?"
Of course, Levi now resides in Los Angeles, which seems to have added a veneer of clubby bouyance and an obsession with sophisticated superficiality to his previously merely Brit-gazing glam/retro arsenal. This album's three visits to his debut's old vamping grounds--"Wannamama", "Fire on Your Feet", and "Oh God (What Can I Do?)"--don't much outshine similar homages by fellow T. Rex-urrectors such as Wolfmother, Bobby Conn, Living Things, et al*.* I mean, you'd likely keep dancing if a deejay dropped "Oh God" right after "Suffragette City"-- until its chorus-eats-itself finale, which probably aims for deconstruction but just sounds like the disc is skipping. But poor "Fire on Your Feet" commits the same peculiar sin as a whole suite of tracks from 2007's The Return to Form Black Magick Party: Its arrangement is oddly suggestive of "Indian Reservation", 1971's infamous P'ul Revere & the Raiders-in-Cherokee-drag smash.
The majority of this platter, however, concerns itself with a bizarrely/proudly quote-unquote inauthentic experiment with 80s textures. Recorded at the same Westlake studio in which Quincy Jones concocted Thriller, at least seven tracks blend dorky/dated keyboard settings, bullyingly fey vocals, vapid lyrics, tricky time signatures, and all the urgency of cruise-ship reggae. Listeners are left wondering if they’ve just gorged on an Anglo response to J-pop, a post (white-)boy-band attempt to alley-oop new jack swing, or the work of a Scissor Sister gone solo.
A trio of ballads soften the record’s grab-bag attack. "Semi-Babe" laments a lover whose Caller ID seems conspicuously overpopulated, kicking off Never’s preoccupation with the surveillance possibilities enabled by networks and networking sites (as well as incriminatingly begging the question of why the speaker is invading the semi-babe's privacy). "You Don't Gotta Run", meanwhile, is a senseless, luscious confection. "Calling Me Down", though, plays like Todd Rundgren pretending to have a "womb" in which to keep the grief his troublesome ladyfriend keeps on a-causing.
Levi has stated of his intentions with this album that he "wanted to have a kind of soullessness so it's almost like some kind of anti-soul." To which I must respond: job well done. I've never encountered, in my 10 years of professional CD reviewership, an album so plastic in its references to New Edition, Sparks, and T-Pain that it would fit perfectly between mid-career Ween albums Pure Guava and Chocolate and Cheese. Levi is that secretly assidious studio rat who wants his labor to look minimal. So: Here's a willfully slight set of accomplished compositions just as full of hooks as the first Hellraiser film, which might, sadly, hold more appeal in twenty years, when played on "ancient" vinyl during a truce-night in some volatile couple's back-looking apartment. Never, never love, indeed.
