Like the Guinness advert tune that they’ve added to their corporate CV (along with a certain Coke ad), Detroit Cobras’ third long-player is a blitz of ’50s memorabilia, delivering more mathematical verse-chorus ra-ra stuff (and even a cheerleader-style chant that’s just about tongue-in-cheek enough).
Evoking Brody Dalle in a powder-puff skirt and pink cotton socks, Baby is composed of apparently twee “come on baby” Sandra Dee lyrics, surreptitiously suffused with sexual innuendo, except for the fantastic ‘Hot dog’, about which there should be no ambiguity; to wit: “Watch me eat a hotdog”, “I got a hotdog in each hand” and, eh, “It takes a lot of hot dogs to satisfy a girl like me” (Baby, baby where did our tact go?).
Obvious influences like Bobby Womack and The Shangri-Las abound, and the shameless use of “Come on baby, let’s do the twist” in ‘Cha Cha Twist’ is either an acknowledging nod to The Cobras’ ancestry or an impertinent nose-thumbing; assume the latter.
‘It’s Raining’ is a gorgeous, old-fashioned piece of nostalgia in the vein of ‘Tears On My Pillow’. Wholly plausible melancholia like “I got the blues so bad, I can hardly catch my breath” works very neatly against a Bobby Vee background.
Baby is great fun, though given to repetition like the pop era it apes. Generous though the 13 track offering is, you might argue that it’s easy to be prolific when you’re mass-producing. But like Kinky Friedman said about the man who stabbed his wife 39 times with a screwdriver, nobody’s perfect. Worth buying for the disgraceful Hot Dog song alone.