Cee-Lo: Cee-Lo Green And His Perfect Imperfections

A potent strain of ambition seems to infect hip-hop these days, leaving its victims with a noble but foolhardy desire to produce their own work, sing as well as rap, educate as well as entertain, and condense a career's worth of aspiration into one overloaded disc. The self-produced Cee-Lo Green And His Perfect Imperfections is one such album: It's a 73-minute ramble through the worlds of soul, electronica, funk, jazz, rap, and gospel that's tiring and inspiring in equal measures. Liberated from the pressures of having to harness his oversized charisma and personality into Goodie Mob's more straightforward framework, Cee-Lo seems intent on letting his freak flag fly, which works both for and against his solo debut. At its best, Imperfections benefits tremendously from his eclecticism, flexibility, and flights of artistic daring, but at its most self-indulgent and aimless, the disc begs for the sturdier songcraft of longtime Goodie Mob production team Organized Noize. A genre-blurring, kaleidoscopic, subtly psychedelic exercise in overreaching, Imperfections finds Cee-Lo embodying countless roles with varying degrees of success. On "Closet Freak" and "El Dorado Sunrise (Super Chicken)," he agitates on behalf of individualists everywhere over tight but slightly monotonous funk workouts, while the spacey "Spend The Night In Your Mind" showcases his knack for strangely cerebral lover-man pleading. Like many of his over-ambitious peers, Cee-Lo largely eschews rap here in favor of his trademark gospel-inflected crooning, which is probably for the best, since Imperfections' excursions into straightforward hip-hop tend to feel a little half-hearted. Cee-Lo tries on numerous hats throughout Imperfections, but the one that fits him best is the laid-back, country-fried humanism of "Country Love" and "Gettin' Grown," which boasts the elegant simplicity of a soul lullaby. Imperfections improves throughout, fully hitting its stride in its second half and climaxing with "Young Man (Sierra's Song)," in which he plays the role of a concerned mentor with poignancy and warmth. Imperfections is too messy and self-indulgent to qualify as a complete success, but its best moments suggest that greatness is within Cee-Lo's grasp.