Gimme Splash, Gabby Glaser’s first album since the demise of Luscious Jackson, echoes back to the group’s art-funk beginnings, at times evoking the sexy nocturnal textures of In Search of Manny, but the title isn’t a misnomer, either: this is funky, riding deeper grooves than anything she did after Fever In Fever Out, but it’s also bright and relaxed, a soundtrack for summer afternoons. For as relaxed as Gimme Splash can get — and there are stretches that are seriously sun-kissed — it’s hardly mellow: Glaser opens with a dense, polyrhythmic groove on “Spirit of Long Island” and really revs up the guitars on the spiky, punky “Shakedown.” She finds a lot of ground between these two extremes, sometimes trading in bright blasts of guitar pop, sometimes taking things slow and easy, but her eclecticism is never showy, it’s stylishly casual. It also never sounds like the work of a dilettante: it all adds up to a worldview, one where soul, funk, punk, and pop all intermix and intermingle. It’s not far removed from the earliest Luscious Jackson records but it’s deeper and richer, mature without being stuffy, proof that the multi-cultural aesthetics of the alt-rock ’90s need not stay buried there. – Stephen Thomas Erlewine
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