Gwen Stefani - Love.Angel.Music.Baby.

Gwen Stefani begins her solo career the way Bjork solidified hers: with a pot-purri of musical styles, sounds, themes, beats, and coincidentally, Nelle Hooper.

Listening to Love.Angel.Music.Baby. make's one feel like it's 1995 and you are listening to Post for the very first time. It's radical, it's quirky, it's touching, it's flirty, exhilarating and never dull!

Gwen tackles pop, dance, hip hop, r&b, electro-synth-hop, and freestyle and comes out a winner with her bag of inventive samples (who'd have thunk fiddler on the roof samples would work?). Working with a slew of producers (including the fore mentioned Hooper) Gwen gracefully embarks on a journey to define herself apart from No Doubt's history, letting us in on her fears, desires, and obsessions (including a few not-so blatant self promoting ads for a fashion lable we wont name here) and making the engaged long for much more to come (Though sadly her followup, The Great Escape, fails to live up to the bench mark set by this album, likely due to it being hodge-podged quickly from the leftover material from this album).

And you have to give props to the cover design, which like Bjork's Post looks great in this LP sleeve format!