Essentials, Joe

A lot of this album is what I'll call "spa music." Think about having a really rough week and going to get a massage or something, and you're waiting for the masseuse to get all her shit ready, and you're in the waiting room, where's there's low lighting and bonsai plants and cool temps. There's also music playing over the speakers. That music is Erika de Casier.

Some of it, anyway. There's also the whole "let's do what female pop stars were doing in the '90s but let's act like we're bored." I am absolutely the wrong person to be discussing Latin-fused '90s pop, but my untrained ears picked up a lot of stuff on Essentials that I would've heard on, I dunno, a fucking TLC album in grade school, or some shit like that. Maybe like early JLo. There's that fucking flamenco-type guitar that all those pop producers slathered on that shit back in the day. Tons of tinny drum machines.

But if that's your thing, then why even bother with Erika de Casier? There's some catchy shit here, sure, but it's a total knock-off. There's no other way to put it. She's from Denmark, so maybe it took twenty years for this shit to make its way to her. I'm crudely picturing it like if some kid from North Korea just discovered Elvis and thought it was the newest, hippest shit. Do we think de Casier is just discovering R&B-style '90s pop, and thinks that people in America are still into this?

Maybe people are, I dunno. I'm not. C'est la vie.

Okay, so it's spa music. It's knock-off music. One thing I refuse to call it—and in a world in which I'm receiving ten reviews for Essentials, at least four people would call it this—is "sexy time music." I find the whole notion of music created to have in the background during coitus absolutely preposterous. Do people seriously choose music to specifically put on while they try to ejaculate? Pop culture has so ridiculed the idea of songs like "Let's Get It On" being a fuck song, that I could never take anything in that vein seriously. Putting on Erika de Casier's "Intimate" in the bedroom would just come off as parodic. I would feel like I'm on a shitty SNL skit or something. Like Erika says, I'm just trying to have a good time. No music during sex.

Back to the aforementioned "catchiness" of this album. Yes, while most of it's boring, it would be irresponsible not to admit that some of this latched onto me this week. "Little Bit," despite all the trappings that we have already discussed, actually had a weirdly sticky hook. Just picking at random here—how about "Puppy Love"? Erika de Casier sexy-moans her way through a Donkey Kong Country ice cave theme song, and sings about astrological signs, of all goddamn things, but... but fuck, it was kinda catchy. It was in my head!

But it stayed in my head. It's not like I was blasting this out of my city van's speakers as I drove down Cecil B. Moore. There are too many wind chimes. It's fucking embarrassing.

So this is one of those rare albums in which I liked a surprisingly large amount of the individual pieces, more or less, but as a whole it's just really not that great. Yeah, next time I don't receive a response to a text that I send, I am absolutely going to hear in my head Erika de Casier saying "just answer your phone DAMN." But that doesn't necessarily speak at all to the album's merits. It's just weird brain chemistry.

GRADE: 2 pukes out of 5