Album review: Justin Timberlake’s reboot fails on ‘cynical, soulless’ 2024 release
Everything I Thought It Was is an apt name for the newest release by US pop artist Justin Timberlake: it is at once very long in runtime (76 minutes) and extremely short on new ideas.
Album reviews for week of March 29 2024:
POP
Everything I Thought It Was
Justin Timberlake
Sony/RCA
Justin Timberlake, the former Mouseketeer who became a boy band heart-throb with *NSYNC in the late 1990s and eventually a bona fide pop megastar in his own right, has now been around long enough that there’s a new generation who’ve likely never heard of him. The Nashville-born entertainer has remained present at the edges of culture despite not seriously bothering the charts since 2013’s The 20/20 Experience. Recently, this has been for the wrong reasons. Revisionist music history has not been kind to Timberlake; once considered pop teflon, a song and dance man who could take off black music and actually get away with it or collaborate with the hottest names in hip-hop while wearing a Canadian tuxedo to the VMAs. His unsavoury dealings with ex Britney Spears are under the spotlight, as is his role in Janet Jackson’s infamous 2004 Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction. It is in this strange moment that the man once dubbed “the Prince of pop” now attempts to reboot himself. Sixth album Everything I Thought It Was is an apt name for a record that is at once very long in runtime (76 minutes) and extremely short on new ideas.
Timberlake’s dynamic falsetto vocals have always been his greatest strength, but he confusingly opens the album trying to warble like Drake instead. A few minutes later, on F..kin Up The Disco, he’s attempting to sing-rap like Anderson .Paak over a throbbing bassline that attempts to recapture the raw excitement of his 2003 classic Rock Your Body. It’s a classic move for an ageing pop star – bring in the hot producing talent, ape the new style – but rarely has it sounded so cynical and soulless, which is remarkable coming from such an entertaining personality. Timberlake’s most famous musical marriage outside of Spears was with producer Timbaland, who he wisely brings back on Infinity Sex — a percussion-inflected funk number that fits him like a glove — and on What Lovers Do, which features a futuristic, triplet-soaked melody. Outside of this, the aesthetic cohesion once again dissolves into Latin (Selfish), Afropop (Sanctified) and reggaeton (Liar), all of which are unusually boring filler and sound like Timberlake showing up to a party wearing clothes he thinks the kids will dig. His name was once synonymous with crackling, cutting-edge pop. Now, at age 43, the best he can muster is to pull his band back together for Paradise, a ballad so beige not even their combined heritage can save it. When he shines, the man is still a diamond. It’s just tougher than ever to find that among all the rough.
Jonathan Seidler
FOLK/AMERICANA
The Living Kind
John Smith
Thirty Tigers
While there might be references to self-doubt and sorrow in John Smith’s latest poetic lyrics, there are certainly no half-measures in their delivery. With his mellifluous and expressive voice and excellence as a guitarist, the British Americana-styled troubadour continues to captivate listeners. Shades of melancholic though richly gifted compatriots passed — think Nick Drake, John Martyn and Bert Jansch — surface in an album recorded live in master producer Joe Henry’s rural studio in the US over just four days. Henry – a notable singer-songwriter himself – co-composed two of the tracks, one of which, Lily, provides a memorable sign-off to Smith’s eighth long-player. However, the highlights of a hypnotic album are those penned by the artist himself, most notably Trick of the Light, a vaguely optimistic number with a compelling chorus: “I’ve been looking for the truth, bitter and broken / Time is on its way and I’ve finally woken”, and the set’s sole up-tempo and most positive song, title track The Living Kind: “Finally dreaming of a plan / Do what you must, do what you can”.
Tony Hillier
ALTERNATIVE ROCK
Mongrel Australia
West Thebarton
Domestic La La
After the pandemic interrupted its rise through the Australian rock ranks, West Thebarton proves on its second album that the group has used the enforced downtime to hone its songwriting chops. A snare flam serves as the starting gun on MF World, an anthemic slab of arena rock that will sound massive at festival fields, and lays out the template of what to expect: big hooks and catchy choruses, with frontman Ray Dalfsen’s soulful rasp a much valued point of difference. Where West Thebarton best shows its talents is when flexing its “Australiana” muscles: Faceless heads into Paul Dempsey territory, combining grainy guitars with driving acoustic lines, while album highlight Neck Pains threads the needle of raw grief and triumphant defiance. The sextet overstays its welcome just a tad here, leaving little growing room for the more traditional rock cuts that come later in the record. That being said, as far as Australian rock records go, this is one of the better offerings you’ll hear this year.
Alasdair Belling
POP
Young In Love
Kita Alexander
Warner Music
Young In Love has been a long time coming for Kita Alexander. The Byron Bay-based songwriter first piqued interest almost a decade ago with deliciously breezy pop cuts such as Like You Want To, My Own Way and Damage Done. More sturdy singles followed as Kita journeyed through motherhood and plenty of hardship (her partner, surfer Owen Wright, suffered a traumatic brain injury in Hawaii in 2015 which required years of rehab). It’s a lot of life experience for someone still so young, so it’s fitting that this debut sounds so solid and assured. At 28, Alexander is a gifted pop songwriter – these songs roll and flow with dreamy hooks and choruses that will hang in the back of your head for days. The best parts of the album arrive early: singles 7 Minutes In Heaven, Best You Ever Had, and Queen are splashed with 80s synths and waves of sparkling guitars. Date Night, the duet with country star Morgan Evans, is a slice of country pop that’s destined to appear on wedding dancefloors for the next five years. While the latter part of the album drifts a little and lacks the same punch as the beginning, Young In Love is an album well worth the wait.
Jules LeFevre
INDIE POP
Good Morning Seven
Good Morning
Polyvinyl
It’s now been a full decade since Stefan Blair and Liam Parsons started releasing records as Good Morning, and the Melbourne duo’s self-recorded pop reveries continue to enjoy an international popularity that belies its lackadaisical approach. Despite this 17-song double album adding more synths, effects and even a string quartet, the homespun quality never wavers. But don’t let the pair’s murmured vocals and couched lyrics fool you: these slow-moving songs are no slacker throwaways. Rather, the affecting songwriting and tinker-friendly arrangements prove to be rewardingly considered. Immediate standouts include Blair’s two-minute ballad Real I’m Told and Parsons’ bossa nova-esque The Lake and lopsidedly lovely Excalibur. Even when Blair’s father Glenn contributes sax to Diane Said, that potential scene stealer slots right into the band’s humble nest of textures. The real magic lies in how these songs splinter and swoon in unexpected ways, prompting major feelings with minor touches. Having twice as many songs as usual only encourages us to invest further in Good Morning’s ambling internal logic.
Doug Wallen
Album reviews for week of March 22 2024:
ALT-COUNTRY
Kookaburra
The Whitlams Black Stump
E.G. Records
The songs of The Whitlams have rarely lacked radio support. The Sydney indie pop band was championed by Triple J for almost a decade straight, which ultimately led to its signature song No Aphrodisiac topping the 1997 Hottest 100 — and in turn, becoming just the second Australian act to achieve the No.1 spot on the annual popular music poll. Commercial airplay followed, in the shape of 1999’s sombre Blow Up The Pokies and uplifting Thank You (for Loving Me at My Worst). In 2021, however, band leader and sole original member Tim Freedman made a curious discovery: The Whitlams had crossed the final frontier and had one of its new songs, Man About A Dog, playlisted on country radio. Sensing an opportunity, he formed an alt-country spin-off, with Freedman and longtime drummer Terepai Richmond enlisting session musicians with serious country credentials to create The Whitlams Black Stump. The project essentially explores an alternative timeline: what would have happened if The Whitlams cut its teeth in saloons and regional halls rather than the pubs and clubs of Sydney’s inner west?
The timing of the project’s debut album, Kookaburra, certainly arrives at an advantageous time for the genre: in the US, Zach Bryan is filling arenas, Luke Combs is filling stadiums, and even pop megastars such as Beyonce and Post Malone are leaning either a little bit country, or a lot. In fairness to Freedman and co, however, Kookaburra doesn’t play out as a cash-in on a trend. The effort that has gone into the arrangements here deserves to be commended, particularly when incorporating elements unfamiliar to the usual Whitlams sound such as pedal steel and banjo. Both flourish on new versions of some of the aforementioned hits, as well as on reworked classics You Sound Like Louis Burdett and There’s No One. Other selections from the catalogue, however, leave a lot to be desired: In The Last Life and 50 Again have had the colour drained from them here, leaving only an ugly mix of sepia and beige, while a closing, milquetoast cover of Neil Young’s Birds doesn’t fit the vibe at all. Freedman can’t fully shed his city slicker persona, try as he might, and a lot of the heavy lifting instead comes down to players like the excellent Ollie Thorpe (pedal steel) and Rod McCormack (banjo/guitar) to get it across the line. A kookaburra is ultimately a fitting spirit animal for the Black Stump’s debut: its laugh loses lustre and gets annoying after a while, but it’s still beautiful to look at.
David James Young
POP
Visions
Norah Jones
Blue Note/Capitol
That Norah Jones was initially hailed as a “jazz” singer on debut in 2002 had more to do with the fact she’d been signed by legendary American jazz label Blue Note than any overt jazz leanings in her material, which also embraces country, folk, blues and pop. Seven albums later, it’s hard to ascertain what genre, if any, Jones is inhabiting. She describes the songs on Visions as having come to her in her sleep, and it’s true many of them are only faintly acquainted with consciousness. Take Staring at the Wall – whose very title suggests terminal boredom – or I’m Awake, with its frank admission: “I lost my mind, now I’m finally awake”. Jones’s vocals are oddly double-tracked almost throughout the 45-minute duration, and the device soon gets old. Apart from the first single, Running — which offers piano-powered pop with subliminal sax and one of the album’s few melodic hooks – Swept Up in the Night also starts with promise before ultimately petering out. The barely naked title track, just bass, voices and distant mariachi horns, unintentionally underlines this project’s misfired premise: “Visions in my head / Everyone is dead / And I don’t believe I’ll wake up this time.”
Phil Stafford
INDIE ROCK
Kaiser Chiefs’ Easy Eighth Album
Kaiser Chiefs
Kaiser Chiefs/V2
Kaiser Chiefs arrived with chutzpah two decades ago, making bouncy and loutish anthems that toed the line between righteous and riotous. When the 2000s clocked over to the 2010s, however, the British band was loved less and less every day: drummer/songwriter Nick Hodgson jumped ship circa 2012, with frontman Ricky Wilson becoming a Voice judge and the band lodging a desperate sellout attempt with the embarrassing Stay Together in 2016. For a band that once never missed a beat, it now seemed completely out of sync – and that disconnect, sadly, remains the same on this baffling new record. Flanked by flat and artificial production, Easy Eighth Album is the sound of a band held together with dollar-store glue trying to throw itself at the wall to see what sticks. The answer is precious little: How 2 Dance offers brief bubblegum flavour, but the rest of this hodgepodge makes a butchery of pop, white-boy funk and the scattered remains of the Britpop revival. If this is the modern way, leave the Kaiser Chiefs in the past.
David James Young
CLASSICAL
R. Schumann: Dichterliebe
Koen van Stade + Neal Peres da Costa
Deux-Elles
There must be hundreds of recordings of Dichterliebe (Poet’s Love), 16 short songs to texts by Heinrich Heine, composed by Robert Schumann in the space of just over a week in 1840. Few recent performances have been so meticulously researched and lovingly presented as that by two musicians from the Sydney Conservatorium. In the creation of their Dichterliebe Reimagined, tenor Koen van Stade and pianist Neale Peres da Costa illuminate the origins of this revered song cycle through the lens of what scholars call “historically informed performances”. This informs not only flexible tempi and vocal inflections, but also the tuning of the 1868 grand piano. For some 29 minutes, the listener is transported back to the heights of German romanticism through the sounds of the tenor’s honeyed voice and the pianist’s whimsical, painter-like strokes. The recording is crystal clear and the liner notes are equally lucid and enlightening. As an illustration of the marriage of scholarship and performance, this album, despite its brevity, approaches near-perfection. More please!
Vincent Plush
JAZZ
Women of Jazz ’24
Various Artists
ABC Jazz
Following its third annual Women of Jazz Fest, ABC Jazz has released an impressive digital album that highlights the current depth of talent in leading Australian female composers and performers. There are many gems among its 10 tracks, taken from recordings made and/or released by ABC Jazz over the past 18 months. The opening and closing tracks, recorded live at the 2023 Melbourne International Jazz Festival, feature vocalist Michelle Nicolle’s outstanding quartet. In a consummate display of scat singing, Nicolle adroitly demonstrates how to take the music far out, without falling off a cliff. Jenna Cave’s soft-funk composition Chloe’s Song is sung beautifully by the great Kristin Berardi, in a version featuring a stellar back-up band and a brilliant guitar solo by Yutaro Okuda. Other highlights include Alex Siegers singing the rarely-heard lyrics to Bernie McGann’s well-known composition Spirit Song; a lovely ballad Canopy from double bassist Hannah James; and a moving track Care Is The Cure from Katie Noonan’s recent Elixir album, which celebrates the poetry of Michael Leunig.
Eric Myers
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