Album Review: Amanda Blank – I Love You

As an avid listener and appreciator of all music, I’m into hip-hop but soooo over the sex, money, and misogyny of much of it.  My revelry exists in the artists who elevate their listeners with intriguing styles and thoughtful messages as opposed to compartmentalizing them.  Depth is sexy.  Amanda Blank doesn’t really care though.  She completely alienates any sense of depth to create trip-hop that will make the most decent of us want to throw down, pull off our clothes, and partake in suggestive naughtiness on the dance floor.

The potent mixture of cheerleader chants, exceedingly vulgar lyrics, and electronic mastery by Diplo and others is insanely effective.  Amanda pretty much cycles through every sinful, politically incorrect two through eight letter word imaginable, at its best feeling raw and empowering and at its worst feeling contrived and excessive.  But after a listen to the best tracks – “Something Bigger, Something Better” in its gun-toting glory and the obligatory and demanding “Might Like You Better” – you don’t care how grimy you feel.  Whatever infection you’ve caught, you realize you like it and you hope it’s contagious.

The compilation doesn’t stay at the high-energy pace you would expect after the first few dirty tracks – she slows it down a bit for some grooves that continue to elicit intense sexuality, but from out of nowhere comes a remake of LL Cool J’s “I Need Love,” which sounds nice with Santigold on the hook, but horribly out of place on an album where the primary thought process is “Sex. Dance. Sex.”  And on the last track, Lykke Li (now mentioned thrice on this blog) lends a haunting back-up to Amanda’s angry message to an ex-lover for a comparatively chill close to the album.

The album only runs a mere 35 minutes or so and ends up feeling like a really, really good quickie.  So if you’re a marathoner or abhor vulgarity of the most explicit sort, steer clear.  But if you enjoy a little forbidden self-indulgence and high-speed satisfaction, give it a listen.  Even the most moral of us may give into the temptation.

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