Review Summary: On a mission to please.
From what little I've read about the production of
FutureSex / LoveSounds (which is to say, glancing over the Wikipedia page and reading a couple articles), the production of JT's sophomore album seemed like a disaster waiting to happen. In the wake of
Justified's success, an awkward kind of malaise seemed to settle over Justin Timberlake as an artist. He wasn't sure what direction to go in next, and even when JT and his reliable, aptly-named bestie Timbaland went into the studio to get started two years after
Justified, their team had "no clear direction for the album". A lot of fooling around and experimenting soon followed for a couple of years, JT approaching
FutureSex at a leisurely pace. Very leisurely - JT said "I don't know, it could take a year" when asked about the album's completion. There was an aimless, unfocused atmosphere surrounding
FutureSex that made the album seem predestined to be a total flop, a four-year wait for nothing at all.
Impressive how it wound up sounding a lot more focused and fine-tuned than
Justified. The entire record bleeds with the sleek, sinister energy of electro-funk and the unique brand of RnB and new wave that artists like Prince, Daft Punk, and even INXS had dabbled in. The title track is a sexy personification of the album's entire sound - JT croons and glides over a mysterious synthfunk groove and a gritty drum machine beat that calls to mind the Neptunes' contributions to
Justified. The strongly MJ-derived "Lovestoned" is a close runner-up, with its' speedy, beatboxed rhythm, layered harmonies, and elegant string sections setting the scene of a warm, jam-packed dance club perfectly. The booming drums and nasally synths of "Summer Love" tempt you to groove along and sway to the beat long before the big handclaps and dance-y strings burst onto the scene, and while "Until The End of Time" wears its Prince influence a
little too transparently on its sleeve (down to having the same damn drum machine that Prince always used in the 80's), it manages to be a fresh, fluttering approach to Prince's iconic template for his ballads, with heavenly electric pianos and twinkling synths oozing stars and candlelight in the background.
JT sounds a lot more confident and naturalistic on this record than he did trying to coast through the Neptunes' and Timbaland's bag of tricks on
Justified, but, once again, the production is really where
FutureSex shines as an album. This is one of Timbaland's finest works - there's a ton of personality built into his sound, and he manages to make every single song come across as crisp, unique, and sharply-defined as possible. "My Love" is a brilliant burst of trance-y RnB, with a stuttering, heavily-arpeggiated synthesizer rising and falling across the entirety of the song-turned-rave, and "What Goes Around" is a delightfully unusual blend of string-accentuated pop-rock ballad and the prickly Arabic sounds that Timbaland loved dabbling in so much in the 2000's. The syncopated synth-and-bass strut of "Sexy Ladies" is inherently danceable, the baseball-game organ and funky hip-hop beat combo of "Damn Girl" is surprisingly coherent and groovy, and the baritonal backing vocals and big, weepy strings grants a lot of elegance and sadness to the NeYo-like "Losing My Way". And, of course, there's "SexyBack", that distorted, pulsating blast of cocky club funk that screams 'guilty pleasure you can't help but love', the kind of guilty pleasure that only someone as talented as Timbaland could polish into something legit.
Unsurprisingly,
FutureSex / LoveSounds is not without its faults. You have to admire JT's confidence and swagger, but I hope he never makes a song like "Chop Me Up" ever again (and he probably has), an eyeroll-inducing, string-and-piano-heavy take on Southern Rap wherein JT takes a Jason Mraz-y approach to rapping - "melodic rapping", I like to call it - but completely misses the mark because he tries to sound like a thug even though, uh, he's not, he was in a f*ckin boy band. Album closer "(Another Song) All Over Again" is not only a little too slow and spacious to justify its' agonizingly slow tempo, its' jazzy, bittersweet sound sticks out like a sore thumb to the rest of
FutureSex - "(Another Song)" is saccharine and warm whereas
FutureSex as a whole is haughty and cold.
The biggest issue with
FutureSex, though, is its length. A fair deal of these songs go on for too long, and don't do a whole lot to justify their length - "Lovestoned", for example, abruptly shifts gears in the second half of its runtime, Frank Ocean's "Pyramids"-style, except the weepy, synth-backed pop-rock vibe of the second half of "Lovestoned" feels jarring compared to the dance pop of the first half. The second half of "What Goes Around" at least manages to maintain the first half's Middle Eastern sound, but the whole song's
seven minutes in total when five or five-and-a-half would have sufficed. "Summer Love" does the exact same thing, with its jarring second half sounding nothing like the bombastic groove that preceded it - the entire purpose of "Set the Mood (Prelude)" is to provide a smooth transition into "Until the End of Time", and while it
does accomplish that, it still begs the question: why couldn't this just have been a standalone track? I wonder the same thing about "Lovestoned"'s second half - a lot of these interludes and Part-2's feel more like half-explored track ideas than a logical continuation of the songs they're attached to, and it hurts the consistency of the songs they're attached to as a result.
FutureSex's flaws are not enough to keep me from calling it great, though.*
FutureSex wound up being better than expected - better than
Justified, better than its' meandering production process would have led you to believe, and better than what most people associate Justin Timberlake with these days (and to be fair, he has not been doing
anything interesting lately - too many hiatuses, not enough good material). There are a handful of awkward DOA moments, and Justin Timberlake still doesn't
quite have the stage presence or - ironically enough - sexiness to bring Timbaland's breathtaking material to its fullest extent, but he's doing a lot better here than he did on
Justified, and the awkward moments of the record are ultimately undone by an album with as many rich and fluid higlights as this. And honestly, in some places,
FutureSex sounds even better now than it did back in 2006 - out of all the JT projects I've listened to, this is perhaps the only one that I have liked significantly more than I remembered.
* Except for that awful album title, which implies a double album even though it's NOT.
