k.d. lang
Ingenue (Sire/Warner Bros. 26840)

A MOJO magazine reader once wrote in to describe Prefab Sprout's Andromeda Heights as something of an aural "bubble bath." I could add some fey cleverness to this to describe Ingenue as "a slo-motion bubble bath in milk chocolate and just a touch of honey," but by then my buzz'll be in full swing and I'll be too busy eating a complete box of Suzy Q's to think about anything else.

Ingenue was k.d.'s first complete jump into the land of the genreless. She had flirted a bit with slightly straying from country on Absolute Torch & Twang … well, not particularly strayed as much as just pushed the boundaries (see the yearning "Trail of Broken Hearts" as a prime example). Then came the excellent duet "Riding the Rails" with Take 6 on the Dick Tracy soundtrack. However, country music fans in general are not exactly hip to variations on a theme, so combining the departure from early country twang of "Turn Me Round" with her anti-meat ads and subsequently coming out of the closet probably didn't carry many fans over to Ingenue.

No matter. The music only got better, and besides, the VH-1 crowd loved it! (Not sure what percentage of that joke is sincere, or if it's even a joke at this point).

Some may find a full k.d. lang record to be "boring" and/or "too much of a good voice" (a la Billy Eckstine), but I've never ever grown tired of this album from the time I purchased it during a particularly painful summer semester of collegiate engineering.

Truly a work in a musical class all its own – a hybrid of classic country, 40s torch songs and lazy Tin Pan Alley tunesmithing—Ingenue is like a double-arm DDT onto a mound of fluffy pillows (the questionable reference to Mick Foley in a k.d. lang review notwithstanding).

The album opener, "Save Me," with its meandering guitars, fades up the album perfectly. Next comes "The Mind of Love," sort of k.d's own "Hold On John" by John Lennon, talking to herself aloud ("Where is your head Kathryn?").

Sonically, morph the laziest day in Texas with Maui's prettiest beach for the musical equivalent. Six more tracks of this await (including the single "Miss Chatelaine" … the 7" remix highly recommended as well) until you get to what IMVHO is the album's only flawed track, "Tears of Love's Recall."

It's like at that point, you've had so many sweets to eat so far this album, you're about to puke. Fortunately, the stunning "Constant Craving" comes at the end like a cold Dr. Pepper to revitalize and refresh.

Dang, you'd think I hadn't eaten anything for days by reading this review.

In the lame period of my life that's been my mid-20s, I have a few different sets of criteria for liking albums. One set is that I have to be able to fall asleep to it, be able to listen to it at work on a continual basis, and have it survive a near-infinite amount of multiple listens. Ingenue gets an 'A' for all three, baby. The homophobes lose this round.

Loud Bassoon rating scale

Review by Bradley A. Milton