Album review: G. Love and Special Sauce - Superhero Brother

Originally published in Freetime Magazine (8/26/08)

G. Love and Special Sauce’s Superhero Brother is what it is. The band’s fourth release under Jack Johnson’s Brushfire label sounds a lot like the Hawaiian beach bum with just a little more funk and a few more instruments. Otherwise, there isn’t a lot of variety; the type of sun-soaked beach rock that Johnson and G. Love have perfected in the past decade - all extracted from the vein of Jimmy Buffet - has always settled squarely in the realm of jammy, often aimless, sometimes dim, sloppy blues.

They absolutely eat this stuff up over on the west coast, there’s no doubt about that. But whether the coastal California natives know something I don’t, or they have just gotten too much sun poisoning over the years, there is something tersely repetitive about these breezy grooves. Oh, it’s enjoyable, much in the way a Corona is enjoyable while your feet sink into the sand on Long Beach. But like booze, there is only so much G. Love you can take before you want to pass out.

Fortunately, Superhero Brother goes down smooth in the mean time. How can it not? It is so safe, so unobjectionable, it’s like manufactured party music. It’s pretty perplexing, actually, how someone like G. Love (or even Johnson, for that matter) ever got famous in the first place. There’s nothing they do that any tanned, flip-flop-wearing bar band all over the country doesn’t do. Connections help, I suppose, as G. Love has proven with their laundry list of guest appearances in the past. Superhero Brother, though, avoids that game, focusing mostly on the regulars.

There are times when G. Love nails a bull’s eye. “What We Need” is sexy and aggressive, rolling along with a Flea-esque tumbling bassline. The title track, alternatively, brings the listener back to some grimy old delta blues, and while the sheen of the post-production ruins some of the effect, it’s still a great throwback to the Robert Johnsons and Blind Willie McTells of old.

But (there’s always a but), G. Love falls into some unapologetic cliché at times, like the completely unforgivable stoner anthem “Who’s Got the Weed”, which was much more effective when it was called “Smoke Two Joints” or “Kaya” or “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” or…well, you get the point. As for “Peace, Love and Happiness”, the obligatory “save the world” song is probably a requirement at this point for any surfer trop-rock, so the song’s inclusion is less disappointing and more just annoying.

There’s really a narrow list of what you can come to expect from a new G. Love album, and if your tastes fall into that wavelength, than Superhero Brother is another success for the band. But that’s all you get. Take it or leave it, the beach looks the same every time you go back.