rickd;3978631 said:
The cover is great. The songs are gonna be great. Even the UK media didn't rubbish it! That's gotta be a good sign.
Xscape has got a great vibe. Please just for once let's enjoy it and just let the music do it's thing.
It's all we have now. Nothing is gonna be perfect anymore but that amazing voice remains.
I'm surprised by the reaction of British media regarding this release! It must be good!
Daily mail writes:
Jackson's CD from beyond the grave isn't Bad at all: New Xscape album features eight tracks from the vaults brought up to date by modern artists
Were he alive today, Michael Jackson would probably be heartened by the state of pop.
He would certainly find plenty of familiar faces from his Eighties heyday, with George Michael’s latest album topping the charts and Prince and Kate Bush the hottest live tickets of the year.
As an influence, too, the singer, who died in 2009, remains a towering figure, and the legacy of albums such as Off The Wall and Thriller is still evident in the lithe dance music of Daft Punk and Justin Timberlake.
All of which makes the release next month of a ‘new’ album by the King Of Pop rather timely. The good news for fans is that Xscape, eight Jackson tunes culled from the vaults and ‘contemporised’ by leading dance producers, is a marked improvement on 2010’s dismal Michael.
The making of Xscape — a record that continues the Jackson tradition of single-word album titles — was overseen by Epic Records boss LA Reid, a judge on the American version of The X Factor and a respected musician in his own right.
Granted access to four decades’ worth of unreleased songs, all with finished vocals, Reid enlisted a handful of co-producers, including hip-hop maestro Timbaland and R&B kingpin Rodney Jerkins, to work on the master tapes.
‘Michael left behind some performances that we take great pride in presenting through producers he either worked with or expressed a strong desire to work with,’ Reid says.
‘I’m usually a cynic when it comes to posthumous albums, but we’ve tried to stay true to everything that would have made Michael proud.’
Reid is as good as his word. If the Michael album was a mish-mash, Xscape is more coherent, and there are no doubts as to the singer’s lively presence.
Jackson, whose distinctive vocals are positioned centrally in the overall studio mix, sounds as if he is actually enjoying himself.
He sings with soulful verve, and there are even a few of those ad-libbed yelps and squeals that could only have come from him. As for the material, two main strands are apparent.
There are the numbers with the classic, retro feel of Off The Wall, complete with orchestrations. Then there are the tracks where Reid’s ‘contemporising’ comes more into play, with a harder- hitting, electronic backdrop.
With swish disco strings and youthful sounding vocals, two of the first three tracks fall into the former category, harking back to the Seventies and Eighties.
Echoes of Jackson’s glory years abound elsewhere: one song adopts a groove similar to the immortal Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’; another track, A Place With No Name, combines glam-rock drums with a bassline reminiscent of the 1987 hit The Way You Make Me Feel.
It also, bizarrely, closes with a vocal refrain lifted from soft-rock band America’s 1972 hit A Horse With No Name.
Two of the more contemporary tracks will be familiar to hardened Jackson-watchers. The busy Slave To The Rhythm (not the Grace Jones song) was recorded in 1991 and earmarked for the Dangerous album.
A cover version by Justin Bieber leaked onto the net last year. But, as with many of the funkier tracks here, the booming blend of synths and strings give the song a cluttered feel, suggesting the producers have sometimes gone too far in polishing their rough diamond.
Much the same applies to the album’s title track, beefed up from a version recorded at the same time as 2001’s Invincible. Here, though, a whooping Jackson is in imperious form.
When critics were invited to this week’s playback, the attendant email (which didn’t mention the singer by name) heralded these songs as ‘the best you’ve never heard’.
That may be the case. Jackson had reportedly stockpiled more than 200 unfinished tracks before his death, but few are likely to possess the quality of these expertly updated period pieces.
