|
Artist: Usher
Album: Here I Stand
Record label: LaFace
Rating:
Reviewer: Alex Thornton
Here's a fun fact: Usher Raymond is damn near 30. He's a bit older than you probably imagine, and if you were a teenager when his debut album dropped in 1994, so are you. Because of that, while he may share time on 106 & Park with Omarion and Chris Brown, he's on an entirely different level after over a decade of solid performance.
Now, even on his fifth studio album, Usher is often only as interesting as the people writing and producing his music. Still, there's no real reason for Usher to try to fix something that isn't actually broken so while they're not all necessarily innovative, there are plenty of well-done Pop records here to enjoy if you don't think about them too hard.
His dance tracks like "Love in This Club" or will.i.am's "What's Your Name" are hard to not like even if Usher himself isn't really doing anything new or surprising to hold up his end of the song. It often feels like he's leaning on how cool he'll look in the eventual videos instead of injecting his full personality into the songs themselves.
He gets pretty close on "Appetite" where he flips the "Nice & Slow" fast rap that we all loved so much back in '97 (yes, that was eleven years ago) but it's still more Danja and The Clutch's writing that holds your attention until those 16 bars. Does any of this really matter though? Not really, because even at times when Usher borders on derivative, he's still good.
Usher gets his Off the Wall on nicely with "This Ain't Sex" and takes a bit of a risk on "Something Special." The style seems inappropriate at first, but after a few spins it emerges as a pleasant Kenny Loggins-ish stroll through the park on a sunny day. Neither song goes too far outside of Usher's comfort zone, but both are good examples of where he can go when singing about athletic lovemaking sessions eventually stops being cute.
Maybe Usher is just making songs for the videos, but there's something to be said for knowing your strengths and it would actually be a bigger disappointment if he tried to pull a bait-and-switch with some sort of artsy vanity project. Yeah, it would be nice if he was a little more risky, but we'd miss this version of Usher if he were gone. Good thing then that at this rate, that won't happen any time soon.
|
