“Just let me taste you, baby/ Can I eat your mind?” growls Lenny Kravitz halfway through his 12th studio album Blue Electric Light. With its lyrics spoken over looped electronica, this ought to be the kind of seduction groove Kravitz can nail with his eyes closed. He’s the man who wrote “Justify My Love” for Madonna after all. But while Madonna’s kinky musings steamed up Nineties tape decks, “Let It Ride” is more likely to remind listeners of the time Ross Geller got out his keyboard on Friends. And unlike Ross, Kravitz didn’t “forget the disk with the helicopter noises”. Here, he chooses to drop a variety of oddball sound effects seemingly at random over his plug’n’play, retro synth line. The only people who will associate these sounds with sex are new parents who’ve tried to get it on while electronic toddler toys burst to life down the hall.
Luckily “Let It Ride” is the only truly wince-inducing moment on an album that sees the 59-year-old deliver a slick set of his leather-trousered jams. We get Eighties-style power-funk-rock on “TK421” (complete with sax solo and calls to “take it to the stratosphere”), fretboard-skidding, bongo-pounding action-rock drama on “Paralyzed”, and sultry sitar spirituality with “Stuck in the Middle”, on which he sings of consciousness before birth. Half-Jewish with a Christian tattoo, Kravitz preaches that “love is my religion” on the rackety-solid glam-stomp of the same name. By this point, he’s such a pro that the track sounds as though it was beamed in from the late 1970s.
