Baptism - Kravitz, Lenny (CD 2004)

If you're Lenny Kravitz, and your last truly great album was Mama Said, and your last album (2002's Lenny) bombed commercially (and deservedly so I might add), what do you do? You keep on being Lenny and move on. To his credit, Kravitz has made the music he wants to make throughout his career, whether it was crafting perfect arena rock anthems like Are You Gonna Go My Way, over-rated retro-fitted numbers like the god-awful Fly Away, or the all around freak show that was the Circus album. It doesn't always work, and lately, it hasn't been working nearly enough, but Kravitz does what he wants.

This is especially true of his latest creation, Baptism. The album is a veritable cornocopia of sounds and song styles, which will no doubt turn some people even further against him. This guy gets more cr*p in the press for being derivative than Jet and 3 Doors Down combined, and well, that's just wrong. To be truthful, perhaps the reason I like this album more than I ever thought I would is due to the exceedingly low expectations I had after hearing the terrible, awful, in the running for worst rock song of the year Where Are We Runnin?. Driven by a fuzzy electric guitar and simple drums, the whole song sounds like it was made to sound like this just to get on adult top 40 radio stations across the country. For my money, Kravitz should have turned the amps up to 11, gone with minimum production, and really just let loose on this song. Had he done that, this song would have been salvagable, but with the general sound of the instruments, it sounds like absolute sh*t.

In fact, too many times on this album the instruments sound as if they're being put through a filter. For a man who has proven over the years that he can write an effective rocker, the lack of one here is at least a little disturbing. The drums sound awful throughout the record, sounding more like a Def Leppard kit from 1988 than a real kit from 2004. The guitars are also too often put through some sort of filter, taking out the heart of the instrument.

To Kravitz's credit, he brings in his touring guitarist, the immensely talented Craig Ross, to help him write and lay down some instruments. Kravitz has always been a stickler for doing everything on his records, despite having a positively great touring band. Despite the filter, Flash is one of the standout songs on the record, with a solid solo laid down by Ross and some nice sax work from David Sanborn.

As I said, the moods and textures of this album vary quite a bit, which is why we can go from the overbearing pop-rock sheen of Where Are We Runnin to the minimalistic and refreshing soul-like groove of Storm, which finds Kravitz asking "How will I get through this storm?" I'm not a huge fan of Jay Z, especially his post Blueprint stuff, but he manages to inject some fun into the track with his rap that fills the bridge.

Lenny proclaims I Don't Want To Be a Star on track 2, probably the most musically aggressive track on the whole album. Again, the drums sound like crap but they do set a tone, and the hits of piano and guitar chords create an angry atmosphere for Lenny to rave about the drawbacks of selling a million records ("So many girls, they all start to look the same"), and the bridge is quality, with Lenny showing a bit of a playful side in a goofy voice, though any song with a lyric like "I got to hang with Jagger, it was really cool" makes me wonder how good of a song it really is.

Sistamamalover has a sweet bass groove to it, as well as Kravitz's best guitar work on the album. But California sounds an awful lot like Where Are We Runnin?, with lyrics that try desparately to sound as if Kravitz is reminiscing, but he ends up just sounding like an rock singer who is uncomfortable singing a rather breezy sticky sweet pop rock song.

Lady sounds cheesy, and not just from the instruments, which once again sound processed and filtered to hell. Did someone cut Lenny's nuts off or something? Is he afraid of a nice big guitar sound? What's the point of making an album that is going to sound more processed than Britney Spears? I'm telling you, the general sound of this whole disc is absolutely maddening, because the songs are Kravitz's best batch since the Are You Gonna Go My Way disc.

In a way, Baptism plays as a bit of a concept album, revolving around Kravitz's search for love and his taking a look at his fame and wondering how happy he really is with it. Unfortunately, the songwriting feels recycled by the time you hit the back third or so of the disc, and while the songs sound different, lyrically, they are very similar. If you aren't going to explore things in different ways and different points of view, then you can only be so successful writing about the same things. This, along with the production, bring Kravitz's album down.

That being said, there are some cool tracks on here, and I liked more of it than I thought I would. It is still not a truly good album though, but I will say it had the potential to be. With some production changes and a real solid rocker or two, this could have been a solid 3-3.5 star effort. Instead, I give Baptism 2.5 stars, rounded down to 2; it's faults cannot be overcome to justify bumping it up to 3 stars.