Five Things We’ve Learned From The New Justin Timberlake Album

Justin Timberlake’s eagerly-awaited third album, The 20/20 Experience, is streaming now on iTunes ahead of its March 15 release. Does the ‘N Sync member-turned-sexy solo star still have it? Here are five things we learned from listening to the album… 

1. Justin Doesn’t Care About Contemporary Pop Trends

2013 may well be remembered as the year when pop music’s infatuation with club sounds hit saturation point. Every track on the charts right now (except for Hillsong) features marauding, Godzilla-sized synths and a dubstep breakdown, and every dubstep breakdown has a remix complete with a screaming goat. JT’s comeback seems ignorant of these trends, perhaps wilfully so. The songs on The 20/20 Experience are mostly soulful pop slow jams, with a few slick production touches and hip-hop interludes thrown in to remind you that you’re listening to something recorded this century. Timbaland produced every track, and while you can hear some of his signature studio embellishments shining through, the arrangements have a distinctly live sound, with swelling strings and horn sections. Needless to say, there are no big drops and no David Guetta collaborations to be found. And that’s a good thing.

2. The Long Running Times Aren’t Quite What They Seem

Internet commenters have expressed great concern that many of the tracks on The 20/20 Experience seem to go for seven and eight minutes, but these people are forgetting that a lot of the tracks on FutureSex/LoveSounds pushed the outer limits as well. Remember how that album was filled with extended intros and outros, those casual, vaguely tossed-off sounding interludes that riffed and expanded on ideas from the songs? There was ‘Let Me Talk To You’, the fast-paced hip-hop prelude that spilled over into ‘My Love’, and ‘I Think She Knows’, the sad outro to ‘LoveStoned’ that practically functioned as its own track. The new album is chock full of these, as each song glides gracefully into the next. ‘Let The Groove Get In’ is just one example of this: a taut and tight funk-inspired song, it slips into several minutes of blissful falsetto coda at the end.

3. Justin Is Confidence Personified

The 20/20 Experience may not sound a lot like anything else on the pop market, but it doesn’t sound a whole lot like Justin Timberlake’s past albums, either. Justified was a sprightly pop album that effectively sounded like a great, lost Michael Jackson record, while FutureSex/LoveSounds was full of synthed-up RnB jams. This new release, with its looser arrangements and live sound, represents yet another change in direction. It’s a bold move, especially after seven years away from the pop game, but JT oozes swagger and cockiness from every pore. He’s walking a fine line with this album – if the songs were weaker, he’d come off like a joke, a relic from a bygone era. Fortunately for him and for us, the hooks and choruses and arrangements are top-notch. He knows he’s capable of delivering the goods, and that casual confidence is infectious.

4. ‘Suit & Tie’ Is The Weakest Track

Remember when Timberlake dumped this track on the Internet in January and was like, ‘boom, I’m back bitches’, and everyone got really excited for a few minutes until they realised that ‘Suit & Tie’ was sort of a nothing song? On hearing it for the first time, I imagined it playing over a montage of clips featuring Barney ‘Suit Up’ Stinson from How I Met Your Mother – in other words, it really wasn’t the fun, sexy return I’d been hoping for. You’ll be happy to know, then, that it’s the weakest track on the album by far; I actually like it a lot more now that I know there’s so much better stuff around it, and I can treat it as an album track. Also, the second single, the lengthy ballad ‘Mirrors’, was a little confusing on release, but in context–as the second-last track before the trippy finale ‘Blue Ocean Floor’–it totally makes sense.

5. It’s As Sexy As Hell

Earlier, I harped on a bit about how this album sounds different from the ones that came before, but one element remains the same: JT still plays the role of seducer. Whether he’s dazzling you with his sartorial elegance on ‘Suit & Tie’, or offering to take you for a ride in his ‘Spaceship Coupe’ (in which there’s only room for two), his moves are very smooth indeed. He’s the man Tom Haverford wants to be, and the only human who could give all those Ryan Gosling ‘Hey Girl’ memes a run for their money. A lyric like “Come on baby dance with me…” could easily come off as pretty cheesy, but on the slinky ‘Don’t Hold The Wall’–this album’s closest connection to the ‘My Love’ era–it comes off as pretty damn convincing. ‘Strawberry Bubblegum’ proves that in the right hands, falsetto can be a deadly weapon.

In Conclusion: Does JT Still Have It?

Yes. Yes he does.

_

Alasdair Duncan is an author, freelance writer and video game-lover who has had work published in Crikey, The Drum, The Brag, Beat, Rip It Up, The Music Network, Rave Magazine, AXN Cult and Star Observer.