The Lady Killer by Cee-Lo Green

It doesn't have any pretenses about being great and achieves in the most basic way possible: by being impeccably organized, well-sung, and well-written, with not an ounce of filler in sight.

If the de rigueur synthetic frills keep The Lady Killer from the visceral, tactile highs of the current soul revival, they do remind that artifice can often be its own reward.

The Ladykiller is unashamedly retro, but unlike, say, Amy Winehouse’s Back To Black, it lacks the emotional punch to keep it feeling contemporary.

What is most glaringly absent from the bulk of the album is the sneaky sense of genre-bending and unpredictability that Cee-Lo brought to “Fuck You”, not to mention his innovative work with Gnarls Barkley.