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A track-by-track first listen preview thing of Justin Timberlake’s album (which has been online for a week)

First listen: Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience

LOL. I went to hear the album The 20/20 Experience by former be-permed *NSYNC frontman Justin ‘Trousersnake’ Timberlake about sixteen months ago in a (s)wanky club in London. ‘JT’ was there for a bit. He seemed a bit bored, which was appropriate. A man from the record label told us we were privileged to be hearing the album and that we couldn’t tweet about it etc etc and so on. There was a date when we would be able to post our ‘thoughts’ online (March 4), which came and went and was then changed to today (THE FRIDAY BEFORE THE ALBUM IS RELEASED. LIKE, ‘HELLO’). Anyway, while that in itself is ‘quite annoying’ it wasn’t really helped by the fact that the whole album was dumped on iTunes for the entire world to hear on Monday and yet we still weren’t allowed to say ‘it’s a bit long, isn’t it’ in a public forum. Well, the day has come. Finally, humanity will get to read my musings on the whole thing. What a day.

Pusher Love Girl

Sporting a massive coat, scarf and wooly hat, and looking like he’s about to leave as soon as he’s arrived, Justin Timberlake’s ushered into a swanky club in central London to have a very quick chat about his first album since 2006. He jokingly refers to it as “mediocre” (or at least we thought he was joking) before ending the speech with “I’ll just shut the fuck up now”. With that, he’s off and the album starts with a dramatic string flourish that heralds the classy Pusher Love Girl (debuted at the Grammys last month), which slinks along over a bed of sampled vocal tics, warm bursts of organ and a smattering of funk guitar. Having previously warned everyone that the average song length on the album is about seven minutes, the song sort of just plods along nicely but aimlessly, Justin utilising that falsetto of his to deliver lines like “won’t you be my dealer, babe” and “junkie for your love”. Two-thirds of the way through the song morphs into something that sounds a little more modern, with big drum claps erupting around some of Justin’s trademark beatboxing. It’s a fairly low-key opening, but hopes are high that there’s a SexyBack-style banger coming soon enough.

Suit & Tie

Unfortunately first single Suit & Tie doesn’t quite fulfil that brief, although in the context of the album its measured, classily old school feel makes more sense. Nothing, however, can save Jay-Z’s woeful cameo, which still sounds like he wandered in from a different song altogether. Still, as with most songs on the album, the final coda is really very good.

Don’t Hold The Wall

Right, lyrically we’re in a club setting, this must be the banger. Unfortunately, despite a promising start, which features an incessant, industrial-style beat, the BPM remains frustratingly low. Justin’s vocals are oddly buried deep in the mix for the verses, and the chorus (“dance, don’t hold the wall”) is intoned robotically by producer Timbaland (whose work on the album, incidentally, is his best in years, which unfortunately isn’t saying much). The main issue with the album so far is that it finds an interesting idea – a drum loop, a beat, a vocal tic – and just repeats it over and over, teasing the listener into thinking something is about to happen but rarely fulfilling that promise. Once again, however, the song shifts midway through, with the beats getting heavier and murkier with a low-end bassline rattling the champagne glasses.

Strawberry Bubblegum

Justin obviously wants The 20/20 Experience to be enjoyed as an album and not cherry-picked for singles, which is sort of fair enough, but as the languid, ’60s soul-influenced Strawberry Bubblegum sashays out of the speakers there’s a definite sense that the whole thing could really do with a change in tempo. Mind you, there’s still time. It’s also clear that Justin’s really very happy being married and loves his new wife very very much, which again is lovely, but part of me wants him to be bitter about Britney still. The most interesting thing about this one – and at about ten minutes long, you have to take what you can get – is when Timbaland does a fairly comical Barry White impression, while Justin talks about how Jessica Biel’s vagina is like bubblegum.

Tunnel Vision

A possible third single. Once again, this one’s a bit more groove lead and deals with the complex issue of loving a beautiful woman so much that you can’t take your eyes off her (the chorus is “I got that tunnel vision for you”), which perhaps explains the huge optometric headgear on the album cover. It’s one of the catchier songs on the album, not least because it seems to have a discernible chorus and some sort of dynamic to it, with the strings giving it a nice melodic lift. Again, it all shifts into gear in the final third as Justin sings “zoom zoom” over a strange tapestry of beats that sound like they’re going in reverse. But that section then goes on for about four more minutes, which makes the novelty of the sudden change up ebb away faster than you can say ‘please let there be a song as good as Cry Me A River’.

Spaceship Coupé

Recalling the FutureSex/LoveSounds ballad Until The End Of Time, Spaceship Coupé slows things down even more and utilises a pretty laboured lyrical metaphor about his lady friend being from outer space: “She’s so amazing, she’s out of space”, he croons throughout. He also states that he’d like to “make love on the moon”, which seems dangerous but what do I know. Brilliantly, when everyone’s about to slip into a red wine-induced coma there’s a comically amazing guitar solo that erupts from nowhere and sounds like something Slash would have thought too OTT in the early 90s. There’s also a moment late on where Timbaland opens his box of vocal-tics-as-beats – the one that gave us the baby cries that pepper Aaliyah’s Are You That Somebody? - to create what sounds like robots crying during sex, which is quite the image.

That Girl

Early rumours suggested this was due to be the next single and featured Drake and was, apparently, a bit of a banger. It really isn’t. It opens with a short skit introducing “JT and the Tennesse Kids” before unfurling into a sort of 60s soul throwback, complete with horn section and a light, percussive beat. If there were a video he would be wearing spats. The song does at least have a catchy chorus of “I’m in love with that girl, so don’t be mad at me”, which Justin delivers with a cheeky shrug.

Let The Groove Get In

Right, here we go. It’s a song with the word groove in the title and Justin loves to dance so this must be the balls out banger, surely? It starts with a distorted Justin asking: “Are you comfortable, let the groove get in”. Exciting. From there a Samba-esque beat kicks in and there are some head nods from the assorted guests. Someone taps their toe for a bit. Unfortunately, as with most of the album, the song never delivers on its early promise, the drum loop just hanging there monotonously. Midway through, the song opens out a bit and feels more relaxed, Justin settling into a nice falsetto groove and, you imagine, having a bit of a dance in the recording booth. Again, it could have done with an edit given that it just sort of drifts along like one long fade-out.

Mirrors 

Initially given away free to anyone that pre-ordered the album on iTunes, and currently sitting pretty at Number One, Mirrors is by far and away the best song on the album, so much so that it’s presence so low down on the tracklisting feels like some sort of test of endurance. Utilising a similar percussive beat he and Timbaland have used on Cry Me A River and What Goes Around…, it manages to look at the subject of love in a more interesting way, with Justin imagining he and his wife as two sides of the same person. There’s a great bit during the middle eight where Justin sings “yesterday was history, tomorrow’s a mystery” with a passion that’s sort of been missing from the rest of the album. Even the coda seems to work, with the song shifting from an almost boyband-esque mid-paced ballad, to an oddly compelling, futuristic-sounding funk workout, Justin intoning “you are the love of my life” to hammer home how happy he is.

Blue Ocean Floor

It’s hard to shake the sense that Justin’s record label were so excited to hear he was coming back that no one actually bothered to have a listen to what he was up to or perhaps tell him that nine-minute long songs aren’t necessarily what people want from a Justin Timberlake album. Blue Ocean Floor, which weirdly recalls Radiohead circa-In Rainbows, just sort of drifts along pleasantly over some more reverse beats and expensive-sounding strings. It seems to be about escaping to a nice private island with your actress wife and gazing blissfully into the clear blue sea, which is something I think we can all relate to.

A slightly belated blog about the best videos of 2012

Before Christmas I was asked by The Guardian to write a blog about the best music videos of 2012. So I did. Then they remembered they’d already commissioned someone else to do something similar so the blog was scrapped. It took me quite a while to write to be honest, so I thought I’d plonk it here so the whole world could finally get to read my thoughts on the Gangnam Style video. HURRAH.

MIA - Bad Girls (Dir: Romain Gavras)

Like the second series of Homeland, MIA often aims loftily for the intellectual and political but tends to be best enjoyed as surface level entertainment. On the incredible Bad Girls video – directed by the never-knowingly subtle Romain Gavras – we find her at one point nonchalantly filing her nails on the side of a white BMW as it drifts along perilously on two wheels. Filmed in the deserts of Ouarzazate in Morocco, its power comes from the strange juxtaposition of the barren landscapes and traditional Saudi Arabian dress with the big ostentatious set pieces that seem to have been plucked from a more traditional hip-hop video (MIA had the see-through, glow-in-the-dark car custom made don’t you know). Whether it’s read as a comment on women’s rights in Saudia Arabia, where women aren’t even allowed to drive let alone perform stunts, or a brilliantly OTT visual representation of the song’s central lyric - “live fast die young, bad girls do it well” - is sort of irrelevant when the whole thing is this entertaining.

Psy - Gangnam Style (Dir: Psy) 

If the sight of a 34-year-old South Korean man pretending to ride an invisible horse around a stable while a skip-load of rubbish and fake snow is blown into his permanently ecstatic-looking face doesn’t raise a smile on your own, then, well, there’s no hope for you. 2012’s biggest meme/song/dance routine has been parodied to death but there’s something infectiously carefree about the original video - it’s disregard for logic and anything approaching a narrative thread (K-pop videos don’t really do realism) all part of its charm. Highlights are too many to mention individually, but there’s something oddly amazing about the bit where, apropos of nothing, he snuggles up to a topless man in a sauna, his own towel prudishly pulled up to cover his nipples. As Joseyirl mused in the YouTube comments: “I love this! No pretence, no bullshit, just entertaining. So much better than all the egotisticalcrap on the radio today.”

Fiona Apple - Every Single Night (Dir: Joseph Cahill) 

There’s a moment two minutes in to the disturbing nightmare that is Fiona Apple’s Every Single Night video where our protagonist is shot sat on some soil in a barely-there night dress looking forlornly at the camera. Perched on her head is a large octopus. Earlier in the video Apple lays prostate as hundreds of snails and slugs crawl over her. Throughout she somehow manages to maintain a level of unnerving intensity that makes you forget the octopus headgear and actually listen to the words of the song, which hinges delicately on the line: “I just want to feel everything”. It’s beautifully nonsensical, merging Dali-esque imagery to create an unremitting melange of visual metaphors that long to be decoded simply because Apple plays them all out with such conviction.

Grimes – Oblivion (Dir: Emily Kai Bock) 

Directed by Emily Kai Bock, who also helmed Grizzly Bear’s excellent Yet Again video, Oblivion wasn’t Grimes’ showiest video of 2012. That honour goes to the Xena-Warrior-Princess-goes-to-LA treatment for album highlight Genesis. Instead, Bock highlights Grimes’ other-worldliness simply by setting her in a number of fairly ordinary, mostly male-dominated environments. So she has a bit of dance in a hyper-stylised locker room as topless athletes wander about and mimes along to her stereo in front of intoxicated sports fans in soulless stadiums. Throughout she looks completely out of place but the video never casts judgement on anyone or anything – she’s not there to sneer or position herself as some hipster too cool to break into a sweat, she just sort of drifts around the periphery, like a slightly lost newcomer looking to make friends.

Solange - Losing You (Dir: Melina Matsoukas)

When Solange, director Melina Matsoukas and a bunch of Solange’s friends flew to South Africa to shoot the video for Losing You they had no specific idea of what they wanted to do. Solange had recently become obsessed with the book The Gentleman of Bocongo which documented a sartorially superior breed of men in the Republic of the Congo known as the Le Sape Society. There to shoot a cover for Elle, she discovered a group of Congolese Sapeurs living in Cape Town, allowing Matsoukas to create a documentary-style account of what looked like the world’s most stylish holiday. As with the song itself, the video feels refreshingly out of step with everything else that’s happening at the moment – shots are held for longer than MTV regulations seem to allow these days, the dance moves slow and purposeful (apart from at 3:14 when she busts out her finest wobbly leg moves), while the whole thing feels refreshingly laid-back and off the cuff (there are a number of cute moments where Solange seems to be in the way of the extras who, rather than wait for the next take, nudge past her or close doorways she’s stood in).

Antony & The Johnsons - Cut The World (Dir: Nabil) 

“But when will I turn and cut the world?” sighs Antony Hegarty on the mournful Cut The World, a song written for his collaboration with artist Marina Abramović and actor Willem Defoe. This question seems to linger over the first two minutes of the Nabil-directed video, which manages to slowly build tension through its office-environment mundanity and the supposed importance of something happening outside the grey office building. In the brief moments we have with Defoe’s character he seems like a nice enough chap and his co-worker, played by Carice van Houten, appears to get along with him until, seemingly without warning, she reaches for a knife and violently hacks at Defoe’s throat. Remorseful and emotionally distressed by her actions she cries a single tear that drops into Defoe’s eye and calmly walks out into the fresh air, only to be joined by hundreds of other women who all seem to have violently killed their male co-workers (one of them is Abramović herself). Probably best not to watch this one if you’re feeling a bit depressed.

Woodkid - Run Boy Run (Dir: Yoann Lemoine) 

Yoann Lemoine, aka Woodkid, knows a thing or two about music videos having helmed Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream video as well as the lavishly epic Born To Die for Lana Del Rey. Having remixed the latter, Lemoine started making waves in late 2011as a musician with his intricate mini-symphonies, of which the string-laden Run Boy Run is a fine example. For the monochrome video Lemoine drops the viewer into an austere world of towering mountain peaks and post-apocalyptic architecture, slowly focusing on a boy sprinting furiously to escape some unseen foe. It soon transpires that the Yeti-esque creatures doing the chasing are actually only trying to help as they quickly multiply and form some kind of army with the boy at the helm. Breathtakingly beautiful and painstakingly auteured (Lemoine does everything himself), it’s one of the year’s most impressive mini-movies.

Lana Del Rey - National Anthem (Dir: Anthony Mandler) 

Video Games positioned Lana Del Rey as a torch-ballad singer for the Tumblr generation, while Born To Die showed her off as some sort of modern-day goddess luxuriating on a throne surrounded by tigers. For the near eight minutes of the National Anthem video, however, Del Rey went one giant leap further and became Jackie Kennedy to A$AP Rocky’s JFK. Audacious, wonderfully OTT and – with the recreation of the Kennedy assassination intercut with Del Rey looking forlorn in a field of pink roses – strangely moving, it proves that despite an influx of plucky DIY videos made on a shoestring, Epic can still be brilliant if handled correctly.

Bjork - Mutual Core (Dir: Andrew Thomas Huang) 

Directed by artist Andrew Thomas Huang in association with the Museum of Contemporary Arts, the video for the pagan-techno blitzkrieg Mutual Core continues Bjork’s fascination with the natural world as detailed on 2011’s app album, Biophilia. Submerged in sand up to her waist, Bjork initially acts as a sort of benevolent mother nature figure, gracefully moving Tectonic plates around and summoning up strange rock formations that soon start beautiful-looking fights. Ultimately though, the constant messing about results in the creation of huge lava spewing volcanos that look like something out of Lord of The Rings. Like the song and indeed nature itself, the whole thing is simultaneously beautiful, unremittingly violent and utterly awe-inspiring.

Perfume Genius – Hood (Dir: Winston H. Case) 

The first twenty seconds of Mike Hadreas aka Perfume Genius’ Hood video are taken up by a close-up of him miming along to the sparse piano-ballad, his eyes gazing off camera. He looks incredibly young and incredibly lost. Slowly he’s revealed to be curled up in the not inconsiderable arms of porn star Arpad Miklos, whose gaze is fixed protectively on Hadreas’ face. It’s an incredibly strong yet tender image that deals with masculinity in a way that’s not often touched upon in music videos. Throughout, the pair play around with the parameters of their relationship, swapping costumes and gender roles with Miklos often appearing as the more subservient of the two. An advert for the accompanying album, which featured footage from the video, was initially banned from YouTube for not being “family safe”, but Hood only seems intent to communicate a fairly base human need to feel protected.

Chairlift - Met Before (Dir: Jordan Fish and Ari Kuschnir) 

It’s all very well passively sitting back and enjoying a new pop video, but wouldn’t it be nice to get involved in some way? Well, yes it would and luckily with Chairlift’s Met Before video everybody could. Basically, like those Famous Five books where the reader gets to decide the plot when prompted to do so, this unique video gave the viewer the option of sending the video down a number of different narrative paths, all of them centred around Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek and her unlikely tenure as a geeky science student. Luckily it isn’t just a good idea waiting for a good video, with each different permutation throwing up something new (Polachek shaving her legs in the university bathroom, for example), as the song’s central theme of the power of deja vu coalesces nicely with the video’s looped narrative.

Jack White - Sixteen Saltines (Dir: AG Rojas) 

Directed by AG Rojas – who also created the distinctly NSFW video for Hey Jane by Spiritualized – Sixteen Saltines is an unsettling glimpse into a world run by neanderthal children (some painted blue), that splices shaky, documentary-style handheld camera footage with a movie-like sheen. There’s a brief attempt at plot when we see a glimpse of White in the opening minute tied to a radiator and again at the end when he’s locked in a car being covered in gasoline. In between however there are disparate shots of pale kids playing hopscotch using a finger instead of a stone, while another scene finds a shop worker swallowing a gloopy blue liquid before spitting it into a co-workers face. Realism and the mundane are constantly flipped on their heads to create a strange world with no rules. Perhaps the best scene comes when a group of kids start free-styling in the street only for one of them to suddenly rise about forty feet in the air and just hang there, completely motionless.

Le1f – Wut (Dir: Sam Jones) 

If Beyoncé’s Single Ladies video taught us anything – and, on a personal level, it taught me A LOT – then it’s that videos don’t need a lot going on when the central performer is ridiculously captivating. It’s this truth that makes New York rapper Le1f’s cheap and cheerful video for the clap-heavy Wut so spell-binding. Videos are meant to be visual representations of the artist’s personalities and in Wut – all gif-friendly dance moves, Pokemon masks and lashings of undeniable sass – you get a crash course on what makes Le1f tick without having to read a single interview.

Plan B - Ill Manors (Dir: Yann Demange) 

There was no better video in 2012 for pure visceral aggression than Plan B’s Ill Manors. Opening with Ben Drew looking out over a London landscape with fires raging in the distance, its almost depressive power lay in the fact that the fictional scenes are able to merge seamlessly with real footage of the destruction caused by last year’s London riots. Sometimes it’s not clear which bits have been staged and which bits are snatches of news footage or scenes caught on a mobile phone camera. It’s a brutal, unrelenting four minutes that feels almost uncomfortably in your face (at one point a brick cracks the camera lens as it’s hurled towards the viewer), going beyond the realms of entertainment into something close to a vital reminder.

Taylor Swift - We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together (Dir: Declan Whitebloom) 

For Taylor Swift’s big Max Martin-produced pop breakthrough she needed a video that simultaneously announced her as a bonafide pop star but didn’t alienate her country fans who still want her to be homely and down to earth. For the opening scene of We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together we find Taylor sat on a window sill in her pyjamas gazing out at a knitted bird. She looks like a 12-year-old at a slumber party. Shot in one take – it’s essentially a Michel Gondry video in all but name – it creates a strange, almost cartoon world for Taylor to live in, as if to say ‘I’m only here for a bit, this isn’t the real me’. But clowning about with her mates and mugging to the camera suits her and as each scene seamlessly glides into the next you suddenly notice what may have been missed before; Taylor Swift is a properly amazing pop star.  

How do you solve a problem like Leona?

Well, if you’re Syco you make her release a hastily cobbled together covers EP. This weekend it was announced that I Got You hitmaker and all round global singing sensation Leona Lewis will release a new EP next Sunday, the same day she performs on the fourteen hour long X Factor final. This should have been the pinnacle of a great second half of 2011 for Leona, her third album riding high in the charts off the back of a moody yet amazing goth-pop tinged ballad. Instead, the third album is now due out in either March or May 2012 and the second single - that a few people had heard and loved - is now on hold. One imagines that a lot of the material due to be on this third album, Glassheart, has now been put on hold, specifically the stuff that saw her trying to expand on her sound, i.e. anything faster than 120 bpm. Following the relative failure of Collide and the whole Aviici-gave-me-the-song-oh-actually-he-didn’t court case debacle, Syco have obviously panicked and gone back down the make-the-song-your-own route. Of course Leona’s pretty good at that, but is that enough in 2011/2012? Should a woman whose first single was Bleeding Love still be churning out covers? In fact, should a woman whose first single was number 1 in nearly every country on the planet and whose debut album has sold close to 10 millions copies be shuffling around a horse sanctuary in Essex on a bill that also features Stavros Flatley? Should someone who was once referred to as the next Whitney Houston perhaps be a bit more selective with the things she gets up to? As much as we all love Natasha Begingfield, duetting with her and that bloke off Glee to help save some horses is just not the best look for someone who wants to be a megastar. Mind you, perhaps that’s not on her agenda. We’d have a better idea if she were perhaps able to express some of her thoughts and opinions in a way that isn’t “it’s amazing” or “I’m so happy to be here”. Leona just isn’t an interesting popstar, which means that the music she makes has to be so much bigger than she is. Bleeding Love is one of the best singles of the last twenty years and she has so much to do with it being that amazing, it’s just that when the songs sneak below ‘very good’ there’s not enough there to lift it. 

Anyway, the covers. It’s clever and cynical from Syco. By giving contestants on The X Factor Run to sing in whichever year it was, we were primed for her cover which then propelled Spirit back to the number 1 slot across Europe (America had kind of given up by this point). Then before Echo came out I suddenly noticed a lot of contestants singing Oasis’ Stop Crying Your Heart Out and lo and behold there she is covering it on the show (the ploy was less successful to be honest). Now, in 2011, it feels that the sudden success of Goo Goo Dolls’ Iris (which has already been propelled back into the charts thanks to numerous contestants warbling all over it) has moved Syco to think “right Leona, that whole Collide shit didn’t work so you can cover this song on the night, we’ll swamp you in dry ice, show a montage of the contestants’ journeys and job’s a good ‘un”. Fine for the ratings and it will no doubt sound lovely, but where does it leave Leona? It leaves Leona tethered to a show that she should have left behind by now. Three albums in and she’s still their own version of Susan Boyle and that’s not helping anyone to be honest.