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Ladies and Gentlemen Lou Bega BMG, 2001 Tracks 1: Just A
Gigolo
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Reviewed by Sienna Powers
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No one was prepared for "Mambo # 5," the song that took the summer of 1999 by surprise and made German-born Lou Bega an international celebrity practically overnight. Even while the album, A Little Bit of Mambo, was charting in every country that has charts and breaking sales records while it was at it, people started wondering: he'd done it once, could he possibly do it again? Fast forward two years to the release of his second album, Ladies and Gentlemen and an answer: Well, maybe he can, but he hasn't this time. There are some gorgeous moments on the new album, but it doesn't approach the complete entity that was A Little Bit of Mambo. While Ladies and Gentlemen exhibits all of the fun and technical competence of album #1, it plays like an extension of that first chart stopping album rather than an evolution. Bega is still having fun, still lovin' women a lot and still blending his Euro-African roots with Latin American sounds, but there's simply nothing that seems the least bit likely to set the world on its ear the way that first single did. Though, in fairness, A Little Bit of Mambo was a pretty tough act to follow. Inexplicably, Ladies and Gentlemen opens with the one song that should have stayed in the studio. "Just A Gigolo" is not so much a reinterpretation of the song that became David Lee Roth's trademark in the 1980s, it's a cover. As such it hardly seems to have a place on the first track of the second album of an artist who has made his reputation as a singer/songwriter. Especially since, under close scrutiny, Bega's voice is not entirely unlike Roth's: both evidence that sexy, scratchiness in their vocals that makes their voices more memorable than divine. (It's all in the performance, Dorothy.) And while Roth wasn't exactly a one hit wonder, he was close enough that inviting comparison seems at least a bit like folly. As on A Little Bit of Mambo, Bega is at his best when he's getting ready to party. The first released single, "Gentleman," is another mambo ("Mambo # 6"?) and, aside from fairly fun studio work, puts you in mind of a classic Latin dance number. Another party number, you have to think that "People Lovin' Me" was inspired by Bega's head-spinning introduction to fame. This here is a love song As inane as those lyrics sound written down, this is perhaps the strongest track on the album. Gorgeous background vocals by Deidra Jones, David Whitley and Theresa Burnette add texture to the full-throated horns that almost always seem to be in evidence when Bega is in the house. On "God Is A Women" Bega gets all soft and Vandrossy while he croons his gently blasphemous lyrics. It's on this song, as well, that we get the first hint of the vocoder. By the time we get to the next song, the very disco "Club Elitaire," Bega seems to have completely figured out how to use it, because our Mambo king is gone: buried beneath a mound of voice synthesizing that makes you wonder if Cher was teaching him about the wonders of modern technology when Bega opened for that diva last year. Fortunately, the vocoder gets mostly packed away after that and we get back to solid rhythm and those golden horns. The album concludes with "Baby Keep
Smiling," one of the Bega-penned tunes included on A
Little Bit of Mambo. This time he's accompanied by
Company Segundo of Buena Vista Social Club. The depth
Segundo add make the song worth the revisit and concludes
the album more solidly than it began. | July 2001 |
"People Lovin' Me" is perhaps the strongest track on the album. Gorgeous background vocals by Deidra Jones, David Whitley and Theresa Burnette add texture to the full-throated horns that almost always seem to be in evidence when Bega is in the house. |
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