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Music To Make Love To Your Old Lady By Lovage Tommy Boy, 2001
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Reviewed by Aaron Blanton
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Sometimes -- maybe even most times -- album titles don't have a whole lot to do with anything. Or, at least, they're some inside non sequitur intended to evoke a feeling or further develop some previously stated idea. More often a single track will lend its catchy moniker to the whole production. Not so Music To Make Love To Your Old Lady By, an album where all 16 (count 'em!) sinuous, sensuous tracks are almost completely concerned with sex. And this is sex of the most 21st century kind: traditional mid-20th century North American sounds (think Burt Bacharach and Tom Jones) mixed over hip hop mixed over various types of jazz and trip hop all blended together into a delicious soup that somehow seems entirely evocative of now. If the name "Lovage" has no meaning for you, there's a good reason: it exists -- presumably -- only for this album. What it represents is a collaboration between Dan "The Automator" Nakamura and Nathaniel "Prince Paul" Merriweather (A.K.A. Chest Rockwell) -- who worked together on 1999's Handsome Boy Modeling School -- with writing and vocal contributions from Faith No More's Mike Patton and Jennifer Charles, who was the slinky voice of both Firewater and Elysian Fields. Though these are the primary perpetrators of Music To Make Love To Your Old Lady By, the collaborations don't end there. There are contributions -- vocal, musical and otherwise -- from Kid Koala, Afrika Bambaata and Damon Albarn of Blur in the guise of Damien Thorn VII. There may be others as well, and some of these may be (unintentionally) misrepresented here: such is the nature of this type of house-derived collective that some of the players prefer anonymity or at least the brush of a questionable shadow to cast doubt on their identities. Not, as in the case of a crappy film, where the director doesn't want to be associated with the work and is thus listed as "Alan Smithee," but more for a Lone Rangerish tingle of mystery. Who was that masked man? This lends a sense of irony to the genre and it's an irony that Lovage -- the collective -- exploits and parties with on Music To Make Love To Your Old Lady By. The irony here begins with the album artwork. Reminiscent of nothing as much as the very worst of a late 1990s lounge album, the man on the cover (it could be Nakamura: the camera angle makes it difficult to tell) is dressed in a private eye-appropriate suit and tie, he is bespectacled, smoking and sports a mustache. On a table in front of him is an ashtray, a dozen blood-red roses and a handgun and the typography is pure early-70s cheese. In total, the album art evokes absolutely nothing of what's on the particular CD. But that's no big surprise. The songs -- lyrics, music, you name it -- are ironic, as well. From the moodily sensuous "Pit Stop," the faintly ridiculous "Herbs, Good Hygiene & Socks," to the darkly erotic "Book of the Month": You and me are a disease and the germs are spreading For me, the album peaks at "To Catch A Thief," which brings to mind Portishead if they'd kept evolving. Though there is irony throughout Music
To Make Love To Your Old Lady By, the finished CD is
precisely as advertised: a darkly sensuous album perfectly
appropriate to play after the lights go out. | March
2002 |
Tracks 1: Ladies
Love Chest Rockwell
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