'Vicious Delicious' is a tasty, burlesque-rockin' debut from pop hellion Luvcat

Three of last year’s finest singles were by Luvcat, a classy-but-naughty Eartha Kitt-style bad girl steeped in burlesque-rock’n’roll spirit. In fact, she’s the wanton basque’n’fishnets persona that, during a decadent sojourn in Paris, possessed the soul of Liverpudlian singer Sophie Morgan.

The question is, can she engagingly maintain this wordy, filmic conceit for a whole album? The answer is… yes.

First, those singles, all golden and placed in sequence early on this 13-track set. Her debut, “Matador”, is a mariachi nightworld chanson of lust and vengeful rage; “He’s My Man” is a sinister torch song wherein she turns into a psychotic, Hammer Horror housewife; and “Dinner @ Brasserie Zédel” is a tale of obsessing over a rogue to brassy stripper music.

Indeed, playing around with Bohemian bad boys is a theme throughout. But Luvcat is no pushover, both self-aware and capable of going off-the-rails getting her own back. “You’re the worst idea I’ve ever had,” she admits on the sex tape-themed, Empire of the Sun-ish “Love & Money”, while the album’s title track is a violin-laced stomp fully honouring her weakness for charismatic rascals (“Kicked out of your house/Kicked in the face, but you did look cute/What’s a girl to do?”).

It’s an album littered with fabulous couplets that she delivers with just the right degree of dry sass. Contagious Bookhouse Boys-ish opener “Lipstick” begins, “All dolled up in straps/With no nice place to go/Because no fucker asked me/To the rodeo”, while on final song, the jazz-rockabilly “Bad Books”, she’s “just a Victorian lost in the Playboy Mansion”.

It's not all perfect – I could do without mediocre rocker “Blushing”, for starters – but it’s a richly written, sexy and tangled journey, to playful, catchy music. It brings to mind everything from 1960s exploitation flicks to Marc Almond to arch musical theatre to that wasted, far-flung festival tent where there’s a half-naked woman on a trapeze while a bearded, long-haired pianist in a glittery top hat leads a tinpot band in a gypsy vamp.

Vicious Delicious is all these things and many more, a riot of catchy songs, story-spinning, and wild feminine energy.

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Below: watch the video for "Lipstick" by Luvcat