On her 2004 solo debut, “Love. Angel. Music. Baby.,” Gwen Stefani mined ’80s pop, a love of Japanese culture, a bit of funk and kitschy cool to make an effervescent album chock-full of mindless fun.
On her new album, “The Sweet Escape,” she gets even more mindless — but unfortunately, it’s not nearly as fun. Perhaps buoyed by the success of odd songs like “Hollaback Girl,” Stefani has taken kitsch to a new level on her sophomore LP.
“Don’t get it twisted, don’t get clever, this is the craziest ... ever,” Stefani croons on the whimsical track “Don’t Get It Twisted.”
But just because it’s crazy and daring doesn’t mean it’s something you’d want to listen to. Too often the album comes off like a tortured trip inside a musical fun house — trippy and exhilarating at times, but after awhile, just plain annoying.
A prime example is the first single. On “Wind It Up,” she mixes the yodeling from “Sound of Music” with whirring bass sounds from the Neptunes. Interesting? Yes. Entertaining. No.
The Neptunes also throw up a brick on the trippy “Braking Up,” highlighted by pinging sounds and Stefani singing a one-dimensional chorus that sounds a bit like a cell phone commercial: “Hold up, I think you’re cutting out, hold up, I think I’m losing you, tell me can you hear me now, tell me can you hear me now?”
The lyrical content is often the weakest link. Though she’s now a 30-something mother of an infant son, she sounds particularly vapid and narcissistic on songs like “Orange County Girl,” on which she name-drops her L.A.M.B. clothing line and Grammy win — but still tries to paint herself as “just an Orange County girl, livin’ in an extraordinary world.”
And the otherwise engaging “Yummy” is felled by insipid lyrics like “look, I’m diet drama, wanna spend the night don’t bring pajamas, man there’s so much heat beneath these clothes.”
There are some bright moments. She teams up with the multitalented Akon for the title track, a perfect pop song that oozes with bubbly charm. “Now That You Got It” is a sexy R&B taunt from Swizz Beatz with a thumping bass; the melancholy “Early Winter” teams her with Tim Rice-Oxley from the equally melancholy pop group Keane. She also links with her No Doubt buddy Tony Kanal for the solid tracks “4 in the Morning” and “Fluorescent.”
More songs like these would make a great album. Instead, there are too many loopy tracks that try to re-create the nonsensical fun of “Hollaback Girl” and fail, delivering an ultimately bittersweet “Escape.”