Rockist habits die hard-- if you don't believe me, go to the nearest used CD store and spin a N.E.R.D. album. Trust me, they'll be there. While the Neptunes' space-age synths and bucket percussion spawned literally dozens of pop hits over the past decade, even as contemporaries like Timbaland and Kanye West were becoming muso darlings, these Tidewater gadflies were mostly denied any sort of serious credibility until they got critics back into their comfort zone by hitching their sound to Hulk Smash palm-mute riffs and live drums. At which point everyone went kinda overboard, as Brent DiCrescenzo put it in a review of 2004's Fly or Die, "limit[ing] their vocabulary to the Hall of Fame" while lauding some of the weakest material Pharrell Williams, Chad Hugo, and Shay ever came up with. At least In Search Of... had enough juice to be called uneven, but the musical priorities of Fly or Die were so out of whack, only the most determined contrarian could possibly still be listening to it. Needless to say, all those breathless "future of music" plaudits were probably anticipating a more profound result of N.E.R.D.'s influence in 2008 than kids in tight pants learning how to pull a fakie ollie.
So yeah, the bar's been set far lower for Seeing Sounds, which by default makes it a more satisfying experience-- it can even be backhandedly complimented as a comeback of sorts by mere virtue of not being noticeably worse than what came before it. But the continuing problem of N.E.R.D. is that it's nearly impossible to figure out how much you should invest in them, or really how much they're invested in it-- as the group's public voice, Pharrell has never shied away from claims of helming some sort of polyglot musical mastermind, and free of their commercial burdens, N.E.R.D. should ostensibly document their unfettered genius. And then they release songs that chop it up with Good Charlotte, compare female asses to spaceships, and on lead single "Everybody Nose (All the Girls Standing in the Line for the Bathroom)", P lampoons partygoing cokeheads by sounding like Baha Men after five too many rails. If you're looking to soundtrack scenes of "Real World: Hollywood" housemates dry-fucking each other at Geisha House ("jump around like you're ADHD! ADHD!" goes "Anti-Matter"), Seeing Sounds might be worthy of regular rotation, but for the rest of us, it's just another baffling, obnoxious mess of "serious fun" from a squad whose glory days are getting harder to remember.
It almost feels silly pointing out how brazenly they're wielding Occam's Razor here: Were Seeing Sounds just a collection of hooks or beats, it might not be half bad. I can't imagine too many people in Starboard P's Rolodex turning down the sass mouthed chorus of "Anti-Matter" or the gleaming harmonies of "Sooner or Later", but neither disparages the idea of actual songwriting being far down the list of what N.E.R.D. is actually good at. The former gets marooned from the rest of the song as they go into a rampage fueled by equal parts Red Bull and Roni Size, and as for the latter, it's ironic that P swipes the piano part from "Changes", since they repeat themselves so often over the span of nearly seven minutes of nebulous breakup malaise that you'll wonder if you got a faulty leak.
Like its unexpected stylistic kin My Morning Jacket's Evil Urges, Seeing Sounds finds its creators partaking in the subversively phallocentric narcissism of staring at their CD collections, confusing music listening with music understanding rather than enjoyment. At first blush, "Windows" nicely jerry-rigs an octave-toggling surf riff to some eerily Sting-ish backing vocals, but get past that surface pleasure and you're treated to Pharrell's typically priapic lyrics, rhyming the title with "she's a 10, yo," among other things (mostly "yo"). "Happy" is N.E.R.D.'s shoegaze moment (no, really), albeit with a complete misunderstanding of the production dynamics-- despite all those flanger sound effects, it's about as immersive as a thimble and could just as easily be coming out of a Sega Genesis. And then there's "Kill Joy", which along with Lil' Wayne's "Mrs. Officer", augurs a scary possibility that rappers are starting to rediscover deep cuts from Blood Sugar Sex Magik.
At the very least, some will feel better knowing that Pharrell and Chad are apparently speaking again, even if playing 52 pickup with genre is becoming the only fun of N.E.R.D. albums as opposed to considering every track a battle to see whether P first gets bored of his lyrics or his melodies; it's a tough call on "Yeah You", four minutes of quiet storm drizzle about being stalked via e-mail. But in an odd way, Seeing Sounds is a liberating listen-- clearly, N.E.R.D. are beholden to no one but themselves and a kind ear can at least enjoy the almost Zen-like nothingness of the Black Card Era: all withdrawal, no deposit.
