BAND REVIEWS

The Sweet Escape

New York Post
The more time you spend with Gwen Stefani's "The Sweet Escape," the more you appreciate the layered percussion and the way the sexy blonde belts her way through a barrage of styles from rap to schlock rock. But like her 2004 solo debut "Love. Angel. Music. Baby.," the follow-up suffers from an excess of studio style without any substantive melodies to make them memorable.

Take the album-opener "Wind It Up," a girls-in-charge mishmash-up that has Stefani alternating between "Lonely Goatherd" yodels snatched from the "Sound of Music" and clumsy monotone raps set to marching-band beats by Neptunes mastermind Pharrell Williams. It's a mountainous disaster that makes you wish Rodgers never met Hammerstein.

While this opening tune makes Fergie's "London Bridge" seem like genius, the album gets better as it goes on. Williams lends his talents to another four songs, with the insidiously titled "Yummy" being the tastiest as it grooves to a tight hip-pop weave.

The title track is another highpoint on the dozen-song disc. While it relies on a single, repetitive hook to draw you in, its breezy girl-pop attack gives equal status to rhythm and melody.

If it wasn't for Stefani's good looks - which make Dre drool and Snoop howl - her style is basically Vanilla Nice. So even when she raps to a Swizz Beatz concoction like "Now That You Got It," her flow is as edgy as a schoolgirl working one end of the double-Dutch rope.

Lyrically there's plenty of nonsensical jibber-jabber used to make couplets rhyme, as well as a few autobiographical numbers, including "Orange County Girl" (about her) and "Wonderful Life" (which can be interpreted as an homage to No Doubt founder John Spence, who committed suicide in 1987).

Ironically for a solo album, Stefani is most winning when she works with her former lover and No Doubt bassist Tony Kanal. His three-song contribution - the Madonna-like "Fluorescent," the lone love ballad "4 in the Morning," and the swirling, circus-inspired "Don't Get It Twisted" - are the sweetest numbers on "Escape." After being both her musical and romantic partner, Kanal has a synergy with Stefani the other producers can't match.

Even Stefani seems to get that and has said this will be her last solo record (until her next one). She'll be concentrating on No Doubt from here on.

Toronto Sun
Sweet and sour. Backed by uninspired tracks from familiar producers, Stefani tries to move into 21st century. By Jane Steveson
Gwen Stefani's first solo album, 2004's Love.Angel.Music.Baby. was an unapologetic homage to '80s dance music.

And a blockbuster to boot, selling 7 million copies worldwide.

But Stefani's followup disc, The Sweet Escape -- in stores Tuesday -- finds her moving forward into the 21st century. Mostly.

Don't let the hooky first single, The Sound Of Music-inspired Wind It Up, fool you.

Despite the yodelling and use of Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Lonely Goatherd, Stefani hooks up with Pharrell Williams' production team The Neptunes to produce a crazy mish-mash of a modern dance song.


And, despite my best attempts to ignore it, I can't get Stefani's call to arms, "Wind it up!" out of my head.

In fact, The Neptunes, Tony Kanal, the bassist from Stefani's sometime band No Doubt, and Linda Perry, who all worked with her on L.A.M.B. (the album as opposed to her clothing line of the same name), return to the fold on The Sweet Escape.

And that's part of the problem.

With some notable exceptions, a lot of the Neptunes-Kanal material is uninspired, although Perry scores a musical homerun with the '80s-inspired techno dance song, Wonderful Life, which was produced by Nellee Hooper and features Depeche Mode's Martin Gore on guitar.

For the most part, though, standout songs can be found amongst Stefani's new collaborators.

Rapper Akon appears on and produces the sugary-sweet, horns-bolstered title track; Keane's Tim Rice-Oxley co-writes and plays on the poignant, piano-driven Early Winter that was exquisitely produced by Hooper; and Beyonce producer Sean Garrett delivers a drumline-and-siren-fuelled Now That You Got It.

Of The Neptunes material, the best songs are Orange County Girl, with the singalong friendly chorus: "I'm just an Orange County Girl leaving in an extraordinary world," and the breezy, shimmering, strings-happy U Started It.

Simply awful are the percussion-heavy Yummy and the synth-driven Breakin' Up.

Kanal's strongest contribution is the pretty synth-pop ballad, 4 In The Morning, but he gets predictable and boring on Flourescent and Don't Get Twisted.

Meanwhile, Stefani's love-it-or-hate-it new look is inspired by Michelle Pfeiffer's "coke whore" gangster's moll character from 1983's Scarface. Stefani says she started recording The Sweet Escape before her son, Kingston, with fellow music maker Gavin Rossdale, was born six months ago.

Maybe the hormones are still talking?

Otherwise, Stefani's second solo tour is set for next spring with a still to-be-announced May 30 date at the Air Canada Centre.

Still, she has said her next album will see her return to Orange County pop-ska outfit No Doubt.

Time will tell and solo album sales.

Seek This Track
Wonderful Life (3:57)
If you didn't know any better, you'd swear this was a Depeche Mode outtake with that group's trademark pulsating synth beats and ghostly guitar courtesy of band member Martin Gore. Co-written by Linda Perry, who gave Stefani her first solo hit with What You Waiting For, it should be the next single.

Skip This Track
Breakin' Up (3:46)
"How sick is this? How sick is this?" begins Stefani on this dull and repetitive dud of a song produced by The Neptunes but better left off the record. It's all about a phone that's run out of juice during an apparently important conversation. "We're breakin' up! Oh, Oh, Oh!" goes the lame chorus.

Sun Rating: 3 out of 5

SFGate.com
Forget about the Middle East. If you really want to see a war, pull two strangers off the street and ask them how they feel about Gwen Stefani (left). Chances are, they'll be rolling around on the sidewalk, exchanging blows before the conversation even reaches No Doubt's back catalog. To her fans, she's an originator and icon, a perfectly pitched blond bombshell that can do no wrong, even when yodeling her way over a chunky sample from "The Sound of Music's" "The Lonely Goatherd" on her latest single, "Wind It Up." To Stefani's detractors, her voice is even more teeth-gnashingly horrendous than her material, and she is largely responsible for Fergie's solo success. We're not about to take sides (although we're definitely swayed by the fact that she's about a thousand times more fun than Beyoncé), but we will say this much: "The Sweet Escape" doesn't feel so much like a step forward for the new mom as an exercise in cleaning out the closet. Most of the tracks on her second solo album sound like leftovers from the first, "Love Angel Music Baby," which itself was a bit spotty. This results in musical atrocities such as the plastic hip-hop thump of "Yummy" and the painfully autobiographic ballad "Orange County Girl," songs that make "Harajuku Girls" suddenly sound respectable. But just when it feels like the matter is settled, she throws up a handful of dreamy new wave throwbacks like "Early Winter," "Wonderful Life" and "4 in the Morning," leaving the world so irretrievably conflicted that an intervention from Bono might be necessary.

The Philadelphia Inquirer
Stefani less daring, still odd on second solo CD By Dan DeLuca

Staying ahead of the strangeness curve in pop music is no easy task, but Gwen Stefani did an excellent job of it on Love.Angel.Music.Baby, the 2004 solo album by the No Doubt diva.

She pretended that her posse of four Harajuku Girls from the Tokyo shopping district of the same name were a figment of her imagination, partied down with Eve on a pirate ship while sampling Fiddler on the Roof in the video for "Rich Girl," and rode the delightfully ridiculous cheerleader chant "Hollaback Girl" to the top of the singles and ringtones charts.

That semiotic smorgasbord effectively transformed Stefani from perky platinum-blond ska-punk singer to candy-colored club-music queen. And it sold so well - 3.8 million copies - that it virtually guaranteed that a second solo effort would arrive before the singer even thought of getting back together with her buddies in No Doubt.

And it has, and just in time for Christmas to boot. The Sweet Escape (Interscope ***), on sale Tuesday, joins an otherwise hip-hop-heavy slate of high-profile releases by the likes of Snoop Dogg and The Game in the beleaguered music industry's efforts to draw consumers to stores for the holiday rush.

At first blush, Stefani would seem to provide an alternative choice in a hip-hop marketplace. The 37-year-old Southern California native was raised on British ska bands like Madness and the Selecter, and is married to English rock star Gavin Rossdale of Bush.

But Sweet Escape actually demonstrates the pervasiveness of hip-hop's influence. Its producers - Swizz Beatz, the Neptunes - overlap with those on Jay-Z's Kingdom Come, and its finger-snapping title track was cowritten with Akon, the African-born R&B singer whose recent collaborators are Snoop Dogg and Eminem.

And as with any other self-respecting post-Madonna fashionista superstar, a new album demands a new look. Stefani's Sweet Escape makeover is inspired by Scarface, the movie that has influenced hip-hop culture more than any other. Her new dressed-in-white glamazon look - which she described in Entertainment Weekly as a "coke-whore" fashion statement - is based on Michelle Pfeiffer's role in the 1983 Brian DePalma gangster film.

Stefani has had her own influence on hip-hop - or, at least, hip-pop, in the form of "London Bridge," this summer's breakout hit by the Black Eyed Peas' singer Fergie. "Bridge" borrowed shamelessly from the infectious kookiness of "Hollaback Girl," and added a layer of lowest-common-denominator sexual innuendo.

As if to prove that her out-and-out oddness is sui generis, Stefani starts out Sweet Escape with the single "Wind It Up," which samples "The Lonely Goatherd" from The Sound of Music, the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical she's apparently obsessed with, and finds her indulging in extended yodeling interludes in an effort to channel her inner Maria von Trapp.

The result is not so startlingly fresh as "Hollaback" but it's a testimony to both the Neptunes' beat-making skills and Stefani's nervy nuttiness that such an unlikely concoction could work on a dance floor at all.

From there, Sweet Escape continues to work a club-conscious groove, as it drops further Sound of Music references into cuts like the autobiographical "Orange County Girl." The Swizz Beatz track "Now That You've Got It" is no more imaginative than the producer's desultory track on the Jay-Z album, but Stefani's pop song does more with her raw materials than Jigga's revenge-rap did.

But where L.A.M.B got over on sheer outrageousness, Sweet Escape is less daring fare, as might be expected from an artist approaching middle age who gave birth to her first child - a boy, Kingston - between albums.

At its best, that means strutting-down-the-street pop hooks, like the terrific title track, a hit single-to-be that's unabashed in its pursuit of, well, escapism.

Less memorably but still effectively, she relaxes into the soft-rock pillow of "Early Winter," a collaboration with Tim Rice-Oxley (of Keane), which Stefani lifts above the generic with the force of her personality. And on the closing, reaffirmation song, "Wonderful Life," Stefani gives up entirely on acting strange, and settles for simply being comforting.

calendarlive.com
Giving birth for the first time appears to have been only a minor detour in the unfolding of Gwen Stefani's budding solo career. Her second album has landed barely six months after she and hubby Gavin Rossdale went parental on us, and she's barely dropped a beat, musically speaking.

"Sweet Escape" puts her back in the studio with most of her "Love.Angel.Music.Baby" songwriting and production collaborators, a savvy team that delivers a similarly effervescent batch of "P.R.H.H." tracks — that's "pop-rock-hip-hop" for the acronymically challenged.

Beats by the Neptunes, Akon, Nellee Hooper, Swizz Beats and her No Doubt bandmate Tony Kanal are poppin' fresh, full of sonic surprises. It's mostly likely Stefani's suburban white girl sensibility that comes through in endearingly goofy touches such as the yodeling snatches from "The Sound of Music" inserted into the album's leadoff single, "Wind It Up.

There's a bit more intersection of her disparate worlds this time — the serious songwriter of No Doubt versus the girls-just-wanna-have-fun pop star of "L.A.M.B." — thanks to such aching ballads as "Early Winter" (which she wrote with Keane's Tim Rice-Oxley) and "4 in the Morning" (with Kanal). In those songs, she sounds less removed from her confessional No Doubt material.

Even with the most rhythm-heavy tracks here — the stripped-bare siren call of "Yummy" in particular — Stefani still finds room for hooky melodics that relieve the potential beat fatigue. The minimalist approach really lets her down completely only on "Breakin' Up," and even the Neptunes' production magic can't pump up this sliver of an analogy between cellphone troubles and relationship communications.

A couple of her songs sternly taunt a lover to deliver on his promises, but she's at her most intriguing when she's exploring her own insecurities and inner dilemmas than when she's acting the domineering diva. There's such effortlessness in the confident pop music making here you get the sense she could keep knocking out hits this way in her sleep. The really interesting part will be when, or if, she decides it's time to wake up and make music that matters again.

The Orange County Register
Memo to Gwen: Just get real, and get back
By Ben Wener,
As I write this, listening to Gwen Stefani's second solo album, "The Sweet Escape," for the fourth time, I'm realizing I don't hate it nearly as much as I initially did.

Parts of the disc (in stores Tuesday) are definitely weak, lousier than usual, even in this Rhianna-Ciara-Fergie era of lowered expectations. Much of it is merely a rehash of that guilty pleasure "Love.Angel.Music.Baby," and I loathe its existence on principle alone. Surely there are better ways Gwen can spend her time.

Like doting on 6-month-old Kingston James McGregor Rossdale – or K-JaMmeR, as I suspect his classmates will inevitably refer to his rhyming alter ego, unless Mom's records push him toward death metal instead. Or maybe she could land another walk-on in a biopic. She can't do Harlow again, and even if she had kept her pregnancy weight, she never had the curves for Marilyn. Maybe dye her hair, don a flapper dress and lobby for a Betty Boop musical?

Of course, she could do something truly radical: get back with that band of hers. What was it called again? It's been so long, you know. And from the looks of things, it's going to be longer still.

But wait, I was telling you about the good bits, wasn't I?

Lemme count 'em up. I'm a sucker for neo-Motown girl-group stuff, so the playfulness of the title track had me from the get-go, even if it's just a shade better than Paula Abdul. "Early Winter," a collaboration with Keane's musical director, Tim Oxley-Smith, is the standout, a bittersweet anthem in the spirit of Coldplay – though take away the lush keyboards, and it easily could have been adapted by No Doubt.

"Fluorescent" is a simplified slice of Madonna circa "Express Yourself," and the feel of "U Started It" happily reminds me of Swing Out Sister 'round about the time that '80s outfit leapt from the plasticity of "Breakout" to the sophistication of its underrated "Kaleidoscope World" album.

So that's, uh, four cuts I might want to hear again. The rest is forgettable fluff at best, shameless recycling at worst.

"Yummy," for one, sounds like the third part in a troika formed from "Hollaback Girl" and Fergie's "London Bridge" – just what pop was lacking. The bizarre, discombobulated first single, "Wind It Up," with its inane yodeling copied from "The Lonely Goatherd" (from Gwen's fave flick, "The Sound of Music"), also repeats the marching-band beats of her biggest hit, then adds some third-grade lyrics about getting wild on the dance floor.

One nuisance features this sage advice: "Don't get it twisted / Don't get clever / This is the most craziest (bleep) ever." It's a wonder she doesn't start spelling fruit again.

Then there's the album's embarrassing low point, "Orange County Girl," which she introduced on tour last year. Over a loping groove, she spits reminiscences like she's an auxiliary member of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony: "From the west side, Anaheim / Small world after all / Hanging at the hotel / Selling makeup at the mall / Making out to 'Purple Rain' just like everybody else / Dame un beso / Now stop, I'm trying to save myself."

I can't figure out if she's saying "ordinary common (or calling, or Commie) girl way," but I can pick up "Back in the 714 days / Trying to figure out what I want to be / Hanging in the garage, me and ND."

"I guess behind the Orange Curtain it's not so bad," she concludes before launching that spiel. Later she adds, "I'm just an Orange County girl living in an extraordinary world."

And that phoniness is what's making me despise her. At this point, sharing her time between L.A. and London while posting a reported $90 million via her clothing lines and selling 7 million copies of "L.A.M.B.," she's no more "just an Orange County girl" than Best Buy is just a shack that sells Commodore 64s.

This disingenuousness is getting rather sickening. I don't begrudge Gwen whatever dreams she wishes to chase, though she'll never be the next Madonna. Frankly, she's not smart enough. She doesn't have the daring or the savvy, just expert handlers and a willingness to be conformed to fit the latest pop mold – whereas Madge either establishes the mold or willfully shatters it.

But, fine, shoot for the moon, Gwen. Just stop with this wide-eyed fake shock at your success. You stopped being "just an Orange County girl" once "Rock Steady" catapulted you further into the celebrity stratosphere than anyone thought you'd go. Now you dutifully play this fame game.

That is, you keep shifting positions. You insist "L.A.M.B." was a lark, a side project – then it consumes you. No Doubt will return soon, you say – now you come with a second solo disc and a world tour for 2007, effectively pushing aside any ND plans until at least 2008.

At which point it will have been seven years since we've heard anything new, and you'll nearly be 40, still trying to convincingly sing "Just a Girl."

Grow up, already, wouldja? Admit you're just milking a smash, and stop acting like your solo career isn't harming your band's future.

"Everybody's busy," you told Entertainment Weekly. "It's not like they're sitting around going, 'Where's Gwen?' They all have their projects."

Yeah, I'm sure Adrian is much happier drumming for Bow Wow Wow.

Look, I really don't think you've given up on your guys, and they may have more patience than I imagine. But be careful you don't push 'em too far away. They're your only hope of making music that isn't entirely disposable.

Scotsman.com
Her first solo album Love. Angel. Music. Baby went multi-platinum in the US alone and Stefani is even more metallically blonde on the cover of this follow-up. But then her style has never really been called into question, just the substance behind it.

Her solo success and elevation to R&B aristocracy in America is all the more impressive given the mediocrity that preceded it, but with The Sweet Escape Stefani consolidates her position, delivering another solid performance without ever raising the bar.

The title song featuring Akon sounds flimsy and lightweight on first approach, but repeated listening reveals a clever piece of writing strewn with crafty hooks, and a criminally simple singalong.

By comparison, her collaboration with Linda Perry disappoints, with 'Wonderful Life' sounding like the Human League fronted by a Madonna impersonator.

Surprise packet and best song here by a mile is 'Early Winter', co-written with Keane ivory tinkler Tim Rice-Oxley, and probably the best thing either has done.

The Observer
How do you solve a problem like Stefani?
Gwen Stefani's eminently likable record does lack something. It's all gossamer stuff; insubstantial, even as it is brave, says Kitty Empire

It is scarcely believable that Gwen Stefani is the same woman who sang 'Don't Speak', 1997's breakout hit by her old band, No Doubt. One stellar solo career later, the blinged-out Swiss ghetto madchen peering out from the cover of The Sweet Escape, her second solo album, would surely be unrecognisable to her old self.

Once a ska-punk darling, then a weepy balladeer, nowadays Stefani specialises in post-R&B songs without tunes that become smash hits none the less. Last album around it was 'Hollaback Girl', the daftness of which just about compensated for the big hole where the tune should have been. Stefani - and producers the Neptunes - have gone one dafter this time. 'Wind It Up' is an update of The Sound of Music's 'The Lonely Goatherd', complete with yodelling, clip-clopping hoofbeats and a rap that recalls the one by John Barnes on New Order's 1990 football anthem 'World In Motion'. Again, no tune. Again, Stefani manages to charm her way through it, a 37-year-old mother-of-one operating at the slipperiest edge of pop.

The rest of her mixed-bag of an album divides into more of these R&B deconstructions and some more traditional fare. Pop stick-in-the-muds will sigh with relief at the 'proper' songs like 'Wonderful Life' and 'Early Winter', the latter written by Keane's Tim Rice-Oxley. 'Early Winter' has all the makings of a conventional hit but doesn't come close to the zany brinkmanship Stefani gets up to elsewhere. The best of the Neptunes' contributions is 'Yummy', where Stefani rubs up against a rewrite of Kelis's 'Milkshake', a beat, a bell and a synthesised kazoo. Top prize, however, goes to 'Now That You Got It', a martial swing devised by producer Swizz Beatz with - yes - a tune too.

Stefani is only rarely boring. On balance, you have to love her for the way she'd rather muck about, letting the Neptunes make armpit farts into hits (all the while keeping back a ballad or two as insurance). But this eminently likable record does lack something. There are no lyrics you want to carve into a hardback copybook, nothing you want on endless repeat. It's all gossamer stuff; insubstantial, even as it is brave.