CeeLo Green - The Lady Killer

CeeLo Green, The Lady Killer (Warner Bros)

The hilarious addition of a Parental Advisory sticker to a CD case these days is of more use to parents wishing to avoid the teenager's fascination with 'adult' language than help protect the little cherubs from a few epithets that would go unremarked in the playground.

Whereas these stickers once indicated a product aimed at mature people and not fit for an audience of minors, they now flag up the fact that there might the sort of tiresome attemps to shock that many of us grew out of decades ago.

CeeLo seems a sensible enough sort of dude, man, protecting his eyes against the sun's harmful rays with sensible eyewear and is apparently understated in his exhibition of expensive jewellery. There is also an engrossing game to he had with his attitudes and songwriting in which one tries to guess which elements of his vocabulary are the explicit bits that we have to be careful of. In one song he informs one object of his affection that 'being in love with your ass ain't cheap', whereas elsewhere in the same song are 'shit' and 'nigga' and the most successful song on the album Forget You is the radio-friendly version of a different title beginning with the same letter. So, not really anything to suggest that the Parental Advisory label is any more than a way of making it seem interesting to children.

CeeLo is a proper singer, though, and Bright Lights, Bigger City takes a riff that sounds very like Billie Jean and adds a voice that has more in common with Mark Morrison than our namesake, Al. Whereas CeeLo does involve himself in lovelorn suffering from time to time his basic message to the world is that he's out for a good time with the ladies and though keen to gain satisfaction for himself, a useful bi-product of that will be some for those ladies, too.

Much of this is, of course, as conventional as an Elizabethan sonneteer writing about nymphs and shepherds. But whereas Al Green and Gregory Isaacs were often more plaintive and either tired of being alone or lonely lovers, CeeLo is more upfront and passionate whether in times of romantic success or in defeat.

But it's a great record, produced and arranged to the minute, and perhaps more enjoyable than I might have hoped this excursion into pop-picker territory at my time of life might have been. I'm sure it's meant to be funny in places; Please sounds as if it's going to be Misty Blue for a few bars; Cry Baby is cheerfully apologetic and possibly my favourite on first few hearings but I'm sure I'm going to get quite used to this album. You take all the swagger and pomp and excess as read and then see what's left and on this record there's plenty.