G.Love & Special Sauce – Superhero Brother

I've always liked G.Love & Special Sauce; their music makes me wish I was at the beach, chillin', which is pretty impressive as I don't really get the beach (as Bill Hicks so rightly said, "it's where dirt meets water") and have never really grasped chillin'. G.Love's the kind of character that lives in a world almost completely unrelated to mine, but I'm happy to sing along with a bunch of words that I have no idea about as soon as the sun peeps out from behind the clouds.He's been around for getting on for fifteen years now, and the formula here is back on track with the early days: Special Sauce make a sometimes-wonderful lazy mix of blues and hip-hop, where Hammond organs, pianos and harmonicas flow with funky drummers, killer bass hooks and strummed guitars; G.Love's vocals are on the laid back Philly side of hip-hop, with ‘proper' singing coming in when he feels like it (often in the chorus). And the sound is nearly always party; either full on midnight slack or smoking, wind-down 5am.Sadly though, the sometimes has now become the rarely wonderful. Once or twice Superhero Brother hits the heights; 'Soft and Sweet' pushes all the right buttons musically, while single 'Peace, Love and Happiness' is a nice sunny slice, if a little heavy on the cheese. The album plays out well too, with title track 'Superhero Brother' being a playful offer to the world to solve its myriad problems, while UK bonus track'Seashells' is probably the pick of the bunch; smooth, slick and graceful.But four songs do not an album make. In fact, they don't even make a third of one on this occasion, and the rest ranges from G.Love-by-numbers to complete dross. Most of the problems lie in the lyrics, which go from dope-smoking cliché to sickly sweet over sentimental balderdash. And it's not as if I don't like a good cry as much as the next new man; this is just terrible, terrible crap.While not every track on the earlier albums was a sure-fire winner, you at least knew the album would flow by without the need to go "oh god" and reach for the skip button. Not anymore. I could comfortably live my life without hearing tracks 6 to 11 here, which is a massive letdown.Overall, it just makes me want to reach for the sublime Coast to Coast Motel, while the often turgid lyrics make you wonder what happened to the man who wrote Yeah, It's That Easy a decade ago; back then, it certainly seemed to be. 58%G.Love & Special Sauce on MySpace