Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: A Curate's Egg, but worth checking out
Comment: As a 40 something white male, I'm not the demographic for this album, and my normal reaction to the likes of "Troubled Singer" Amy Winehouse, Kate Allen, Lily Nash etc is to flip the off button.
So I was surprised - and pleased - to find that this is a very good album on the whole. Its good points are
1. The Music - though it is full of the currently fashionable horns and 60s soul sound, it doesn't sound contrived or consciously "retro". On the contrary, it sounds very contemporary - the sort of thing that gives "pop" a good name.
2. Singer Imani Coppola has a great voice
3. When the songs work - which is at least 7 of the 11 tracks - they are catchy, full of humour and wry observation.
On the negative side, there are a few let downs. The lyrics are sometimes embarassingly awful - "men are from Mars, women are from Venus, we think with our minds, they think with their penis" being possibly the worst example while the final track is a cliched "we had it tough as kids but we all looked after each other" with a hip-hop by numbers tune. And some of the targets are a bit predictable.
That said, any album which contains songs as good as "28 Butts", in which the singer wonders how a childhood full of fun and promise has deteriorated into unemployment, cigarettes and booze, or as funny as "Cryin' for the Queen" which is a thinly veiled attack on the above mentioned "Troubled Singer" is definitely worth investigating
Customer Rating:
Summary: ...a little clinical, but irresistible...
Comment: Here, I'll have some of that Joss Stone / Amy Winehouse success. Please. Thus the return of nineties one hit wonder, Imani Coppola is heralded. You may remember her from the minor 1997 hit 'Legend of a Cowgirl', the Donovan sampling Top 40 record, or even her debut album, famously named "Chupucabra". Or "goat sucker" to the Spanish speakers out there. Either way, her kooky Daisy Age, De La Soul style pop saw her getting dropped by her record company, with a second album shelved.
Since then, she's been off on the musical fringes, doing her own thing. And when I tell you that some of that time was spent with arch madman and erstwhile Faith No More dude, Mike Patton, then you will know just how far she had travelled from her heyday. Things aren't helped by an interview she gave where she admitted that the success of Gnarls Barkley and Amy Winehouse "gave me a great opportunity to get back in the game". If that sounded a little too calculating, her choice of collaborator in Little Jackie turned out to be Adam Pallin, a producer best known for his stints working with various American Idol contestants.
So, cold hearted bid for pop mainstream. Probably. So curses for this album being so gosh darned good! Because it is. The music is very Motown derived, so that should be good enough to score some radio airplay. It's chock full of memorable melodies, and little bits that have you humming for days. Well garnished soul pop for the Tesco / WalMart shoppers who scare easily. Feel free to drop in some hip-hop rhythms, bit for pitys sake, don't scare away Middle America. To be fair, Ms Coppola does drop in some barbed lines here and there, although the targets - Paris Hilton and globalisation - are a bit too weekend eco-warrior to hit home with any venom. That's when you get past some ludicrous couplets like "They came from Mars, women came from Venus/ We think with our brains, men think it's all meaningless". What? Neither scan nor rhyme, begone. But she can still lay it down, as she does on one of the highlights, 'Go Hard Or Go Home'.
It actually might be a little late in the day to grab some reflected Winehouse glory, but the tunes are just so addictive, that you can only wish them well.
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