Pop tart Gwen Stefani -- pretty as she can be, with a midriff for the ages -- celebrated a special birthday recently: the dreaded three-oh. And by industry standards -- those sad, governing, youth-obsessed, number-crunching principles -- such a cosmic reckoning usually means one thing: Keep the salt lick and denture grip handy, folks, Grandma's ready for pasture. But not before she blubbers on and frickin' on about all three of life's injustices: bad boys; being helplessly drawn to bad boys; and the knowledge that only bad boys are capable of dumping her on her pert little poodle-skirted heinie. To make matters worse, a new generation of interlopers are certified Gwenabes -- and they have poodle skirts, too! And they're everywhere, with better, younger heinies! It's a new, disturbing trend that clearly plagues our sad, creaking Gwendaline.
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Thank heavens for Saturn -- the good and faithful planet -- which realigns itself every thirty years to the precise position it held at a person's birth. When Saturn returns, it's time to reflect and mature. In Gwen's case, think of it as a "Journey to the Center of the, Like, Way Geriatric Valley Girl."
Better never than late, Return of Saturn would be easier to swallow if the merchandisers weren't packaging it as so much glamorized poodle heinie -- dyed, perfumed, sickeningly cute -- and if the band didn't display such a blatant disregard for good black leather. Oh, yeah, the music: Sporting a screaming fuchsia coif, the chanteuse -- make that fuchsianteuse -- regurgitates her familiar pap with a decidedly nostalgic bent for '80s-era new wave. It's Missing Persons meets Oingo Boingo in a Split Enz nightmare. Simon LeBon taken hostage, mistreated, left for fashionably dead. Stretch limos and smog. Reaganomics and mullet cuts so bad you wake up screaming. Jesus H. Marimba! Didn't it suck enough the first time around?
Take a tune like the synth-dredged "Magic's in the Makeup" and try not to picture anorexics in flapjack powder hawking wares for Revlon. Take "Artificial Sweetener," a mopey ballad in which Pinkie realizes that a me-first credo gets in the way of "finding herself" -- the irony of it all! "Out of artificial sweetener," she boohoos. Why not ask the neighbors for a cup of sugar? "I'm on the fence/Push me off," she wails on the same track. How 'bout the Royal Gorge instead?
Combining cold studio gloss-and-kick with tired electronic hookery, producer Glen Ballard beefs up this dud without many traces of the sound that put the band on the map to begin with: ska. "Marry Me" slow dances with ska's hipper cousin, reggae -- proof that No Doubt should spark more of the good green Elitch -- and finds the "diva" wrestling with that nagging spinster/fairy princess dilemma. Indeed, on most of this disc, she simply wallows incessantly in her self-made helplessness. For all the lost little girls out there pining away for a "bad boy" to come make it all better, you'd empower yourself waaay more by listening to Patti Smith or Joan Jett. Actually, you could do just about anything besides listen to Return to Saturn, except maybe vomit.
