How Justin Timberlake must have sweated and strained over following his debut, Justified: As an album it was merely good, but it was graced by four singles so monumental they made him one of the decade's most celebrated pop icons. According to the laws of momentum which govern pop music, any sequel could only be either be a pale reflection or a hubristic monstrosity. With FutureSex/LoveSounds he unrepentantly chooses the latter.
If Justified was openly modelled on Off the Wall, FutureSex/LoveSounds' affectations are more panoramic: In reductive terms, it's the logical Thriller-style follow-up, steelier and sexier and more neurotic than its predecessor, but generally the album is more reminiscent of Prince-- not only the polished funk-pop of Purple Rain, but also the grandiose excess of Prince's last 20 years. Nothing is necessarily gained (and often much is lost) when pop music attires itself in notions of artistry and ambition, but with Justin it is, perversely, what makes him such a good pop star: As with Christina Aguilera, towering self-belief and stylistic metamorphoses provide a spectacle which papers over his stumbles and adds lustre to his successes.
Almost entirely produced by Timbaland-- and with a more pronounced hip-hop edge than its predecessor-- the album abandons the feelgood sheen which the Neptunes peddled so adroitly on Justified, but makes up for it with the largesse of its sonic embrace, with Timbaland resurrecting many of his most effective guises, from rubbery synthetic funk to pseudo-crunk blare to eerie Eastern opulence. Throughout, the grooves are defined by their melodic intensity: It's the searing synth riffs and skyscraping strings which grab your attention, not stuttering beats or startling sound effects-- although these, too, are present in abundance.
Here, Timberlake magnifies the persona he adopted on his debut, somehow both consummate lover and desperately needy. On hyperactive second single "My Love" his sexual propositions constantly elide into a proposal, as if anything less than matrimony is barely worth contemplating. Likewise, the suavely portentous title track-- poised between the carnal strut of Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" (well, its verses) and the masochistic flutter of the Junior Boys-- derives its charm from its lofty aspirations, like a familiar lover staging an elaborately exaggerated seduction. It is this excess of ambition over achievement, as opposed to any real consistency, which makes FutureSex/LoveSounds more of an album than Justified was. Songs which sound puzzlingly self-indulgent in isolation-- most obviously, the smirking, tenuously tuneful first single "SexyBack"-- are cloaked in a compelling intensity and purposefulness when played in succession.
Most brilliantly, the tight, clipped disco-funk of "LoveStoned" descends precipitously into the gorgeous melancholy of "I Think That She Knows", all MOR-rock guitar churn and weightless strings, the same chorus ("She's got me love stoned…and I think that she knows") transformed from infatuation to the paranoid and elegiac admission of an addict. This unselfconscious (or, rather, hyper-selfconscious) revelling in melodramatic gestures is among the album's attractions; even the handful of glutinous ballads are admirable for their lack of restraint or proportion-- in particular, the gospel-tinged morality tale "Losing My Way", graced by utterly cringeworthy lyrics, is somehow both a colossal disaster and deeply lovable. Such missteps are few, but also a necessary piece of this album's puzzle: By courting disaster so fearlessly, Timberlake's reach makes his music attractive-- even when it exceeds his grasp.
