Electric Mile

Album Review

Like G. Love & Special Sauce's previous albums, The Electric Mile isn't easy to categorize. Is it alternative rock, psychedelic rock, retro-soul, funk, or hip-hop? Actually, this diverse, unpredictable CD is a combination of those things — and the group also shows its appreciation of reggae, blues, and folk. True to form, vocalist G. Love and his colleagues keep things unpredictable; you never know from one song to the next if they will tend to favor retro-soul ("Night of the Living Dead"), hip-hop ("Parasite," "Electric Mile"), folk-rock ("Sara's Song"), psychedelic blues-rock ("Poison"), or reggae ("Unified"). And the impressive thing is that G. Love can go in so many different directions and never fail to sound distinctive, which is something he has in common with Prince and David Bowie. But while The Electric Mile (which is G. Love's fifth album) has more plusses than minuses, it isn't perfect. A few of the tunes sound unfocused, and not everything that G. Love & Special Sauce try is successful — occasionally, a song will miss its mark. But more often than not, the trio's risk-taking pays off on this generally rewarding, if imperfect, CD.