Cee Lo Green – The Lady Killer
It must have been hard being Cee Lo Green during the mid noughties, watching as fellow Dirty South pioneers OutKast cleaned up at the Grammys and dominated the charts while he struggled to stay signed to a label.
The onetime Goodie Mob member finally got some commercial recognition in 2006 for his boundary-pushing neo funk as the smooth-voiced half of Gnarls Barkley. Now the big man is back with his third solo effort The Lady Killer, a 14-track album packed with the kind of off-kilter, upbeat soul which has always made him the critics’ darling.
The unsettling Bodies and the storming Forget You are the undoubted highlights. But the album doesn’t hang together particulary well and just as he sings on I Want You, for this critic at least, “the thrill is gone”.
3/5
– Alison grinter
