Kenna's debut album, New Sacred Cow, has been around in one form or another since 2001. It should've remained shelved. Save Neptunes producer Chad Hugo's meticulous drum programming, there isn't a sound on it that's worth a damn. Hugo, whom some regard as a sort of holy bovine himself, also plays sax and keyboards here, but he can't polish this overblown turd. The Ethiopian-born Kenna recalls many of the worst aspects of '80s "cutting edge" rock: the grating bombast of Tears for Fears and U2, the whiny vocals of the Cure's Robert Smith and the Fixx's Cy Curnin, and the over-reliance on the string-heavy power-ballad format of past-its-prime Simple Minds. Lines such as When I fall asleep, I'm a puppet cutting strings match the disc's sonic incompetence.
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