Y2K is again and Justin Timberlake is the asterisk within the development report, left within the filth like skinny scarves and fedoras. The ex-*NSYNC singer’s stuttering electro-pop, kissed with silky millennium-era R&B, produced no less than one all-time album with 2006’s FutureSex/LoveSounds. However after a decade of borderlineunlistenable music, hindsight means that regardless of his skills as a performer, Timberlake was additionally merely in the appropriate place on the proper time to learn from Timbaland’s mid-’00s scorching streak, or snag the Michael Jackson rejects that made up his 2002 debut Justified.
Timberlake’s sixth album, All the pieces I Thought It Was, is designed to buff the dents out of his public picture within the wake of a latest memoir by his ex-girlfriend, Britney Spears. She wrote that he inspired her to get an abortion, informed the media she was a “dishonest slut and a liar,” and customarily acted even worse than you may think from a cornrowed white dude who’s inclined to talk in AAVE. In an interview to advertise the album’s lead single “Egocentric,” a wispy mea culpa directed to “the proprietor of my coronary heart and all my scars,” aka his spouse of 12 years Jessica Biel, Timberlake spoke admiringly of music that lays male feelings naked. Referencing Donny Hathaway’s cowl of “Jealous Man,” he informed Zane Lowe, “You simply don’t hear that from males typically, that they’d categorical an emotion that makes them susceptible. Rising up the way in which I grew up, you’re sort of taught not to do this.”
Timberlake’s learn on modern pop may have been true half a decade in the past, however in the present day’s radio airwaves are stuffed with males speakingaboutemotions, and the largest songs final 12 months from male artists had been craving nationballads. Nobody actually desires to listen to about gender from an artist who noticed match to title a 2013 single “Take Again the Night time,” however softboy masculinity is a helpful touchstone for an artist embarking on a redemption arc. Listening to his new album makes all of it really feel about as convincing because the rootsy pose he struck on 2018’s Man of the Woods, an album for the hypebeast whose mountain climbing boots have by no means seen soil.
At 77 minutes, the mercilessly unhurried All the pieces I Thought It Was does all the pieces you thought Justin Timberlake did however worse. Opposite to the story he informed Lowe, the album stops wanting meaningfully grappling along with his previous, providing a lily pad for rote, randy showmanship. “Flame” shoots for the cinematic swoop of “What Goes Round…Comes Round” however trades the intricacy of FutureSex/LoveSounds’ karmic ballet for clean radio piano, soundbank samples of siren wails, and arson metaphors piled like dusty coals which are by no means going to take. By the tip of the tune you’re begging for one thing, something to jolt the tune’s eight producers out of bird-feeding Timberlake’s former triumphs again to you.
