#942 Justin Timberlake - The 20/20 Experience

You gotta admire the nerve, putting at an album of almost exclusively 7+ minute pop (?) tracks. Not burying one or two in the 9-slot, just making that the backbone baseline song length, letting that kind of expansiveness dictate the basic pacing, dilating the timescale of the album-listening experience. Timberlake uses all that space to on a combination of hynotic, slowjam repetition and cheeky diversions, buildups, breakdowns, and outright leftfield asides. If Timberlake wanted to be Michael on his last album, here he wants to be Stevie circa Songs in the Key of Life: fearless and heedless.

Two problems: 1) too many of these songs feel like more traditional songs stretched, plumped, puffed, baggy around a thin idea or two. 2) those (thin) ideas are build on some pretty tired, halfhearted lovesick entendre-and-a-halfs. Here's a game I invented: I give you the concept for a song and you tell me if its by Justin Timberlake, Flight of the Conchords, Party Posse, or Boys 4 Now.

Here's a hint, the 20/20 experience is mostly songs about how love is like being addicted to a drug, how love is like candy, or how Justin wants to take you for a ride in his car, which is also a spaceship. Maybe the album's trying to elevate the low, but if that's the plan its not pulling it off: this just comes across as lazy songwriting, and it clashes against the bald ambition of the song structures. You can't pull off "cool" when you're pitching 5th grade woo over top of your beats, no matter how post- you're trying to be. I'll take half of a bold gesture over something truly gutless any day, but if you're going to go in swinging, don't pull your punches for christsake 3/5