Jamie Lidell in traditionalist blue-eyed soul mode can be good; Jim is still a fine record to sink into on a weekend afternoon. But he shines when he really pushes things, playing up the unpredictable smooth-yet-sharp timbre of his voice and pitting it against a deviation of R&B that's not quite beholden to a specific style. When Jamie Lidell's lead single "What a Shame" debuted last fall, it was an encouraging bellwether, a bristling fusion of current dance and R&B trends that lurched and pulsed like crossover dubstep used to a few years before the EDM craze enlisted it in the loudness wars. "What a Shame" did what great alt pop should do: sound radio-friendly while not entirely sounding like much else on the radio.
Unfortunately, most of Jamie Lidell sounds like everything else on the radio-- more specifically, those transmissions hanging 25 light years out in space that are still beaming signals from 1988. And while there are worse sins than aiming for a faithful recreation of every Reagan baby's favorite rollerskate jams and almost succeeding, there's also a failure to distinguish itself from the precedents it pays tribute to-- a simulation that's almost instantly forgettable, especially in the wake of adventurous oddity Compass. Everything that makes Lidell unique is buried under a fog of spot-the-reference touchstones, a predictable pop funk pastiche that points towards the obvious forerunners-- the Minneapolis sound of Prince and Jam/Lewis; In Square Circle Stevie; red codpiece-era Cameo-- but doesn't do much to expand on the form.
Not that this keeps him from cranking out a couple decent songs. "So Cold" has this spaced-out The Love Below outtake feel to it that builds from a wounded, disoriented intro into a frost-covered sheen of hazy boogie funk, and its terse yet anxious keyboard solo is the liveliest moment on the record. The New Jack Swing mutation of "In Your Mind" is deconstructive without being smarmy about it; slightly off-kilter synths and burbly digital bass run interference, but energize the backbeat instead of derailing it. Sadly, there's little else that sticks in the compositions, which seem to play it safe compared to the borderline iconoclastic 80s funk homages like Multiply's "When I Come Back Around" or "I Wanna Be Your Telephone" from Compass. Most of this could remind veteran R&B fans that they'd be better off listening to actual solo Roger Troutman ("Do Yourself a Faver") or Running Scared soundtrack Michael McDonald ("Big Love") than blurry Xeroxes. And considering how similar tributes to the same era from mainstream R&B and pop figures ranging from Ne-Yo to Timberlake to the-Dream have been a standard ploy for years, it only stands out that much more just how risky this stuff isn't. Who's up for a po-faced version of Chromeo?
But that's only half of the problem. The other, inseparable half is Lidell's voice-- less taking an adventurous approach to the sincere self-awareness of his limitations than a workmanlike take on sub-Jamiroquai all-surface singing. Half the time, he's flat and affectless, like he's skimming the lyric sheet waiting for something interesting to sing. And three-quarters of that time, he's also inarticulate, pulling the mix over his voice like a muffler and enunciating like he's burned the roof of his mouth. The titular hook to "Big Love" becomes more indistinct as it goes on, ending up something like "bee luh." And while overdubs and multitracks draw some attention-getting melodic qualities from his voice, they also muddle it into distorted mush-- though it's not as ill-advised as the downpitched adenoidal Dixieland goof "why_ya_why", which is the cruelest parody of Cee-Lo ever recorded whether it means to be or not. If there were deep personal insights trapped inside that garbled diction, it might be worth it, but given all the flat cliches (a typical example from "Blaming Something": "There's always a price to pay/ For all that runnin' away"), it's not worth straining your ears.
The shame of it is that somewhere in here there's an album that could've done more to revive the mostly moribund idea of 80s pop tropes in contemporary music. As a producer and musician with an ear for what sounds good as pure timbre, Lidell has previously shown a gift for pulling all the updated sonic potential from decades-old ideas. That retrofitting occasionally gets over the novelty of dealing with the past here and there on this record, and sparsely draws on his history of IDM tinkering to give it some subtly strange qualities. But it's not enough to keep Jamie Lidell from disappointing anonymity. Most of the time I tried to remember a song 15 minutes after hearing it, I got the Whispers or Alexander O'Neal stuck inside my head instead. That's a nice thing for a mediocre album to do, but a letdown from someone who isn't a mediocre artist.
