Uneven albums are all-too-familiar territory for R. Kelly fans. Even his best-loved (and plain best) albums, like 2003's world-conquering and rep-rehabilitating Chocolate Factory, feel like collections of blindingly slick singles padded with soggy ballads, awkward collaborations, and half-baked conceptual art pieces masquerading as R&B songs. So it's easy, in retrospect, to see the uniform goodness of 2011's Love Letter as an unexpected stroke of luck. Though marred by some chintzy synthesized orchestral sections from a guy you knew could afford actual horns and strings, it was the first of Kelly's albums since the early 1990s where he didn't trip himself up by overreaching. He simply wrote some wonderful mash-notes to the soul and R&B artists who metaphorically reared him as a young aspirant, and sang those songs at the top of his not-inconsiderable abilities.
The problem with Write Me Back is that it doesn't go far enough. By that, I don't mean he should have returned to the maniacal story-songs he drove into the ground after "Trapped in the Closet", cranked up the sex metaphors to an even more deranged degree, or gone cherry-picking the hottest new sounds. A more restrained, classicist, and focused R. Kelly was a good look, especially since enough of his irrepressible weirdness is always going to shine through and keep things from feeling too buttoned-up.
But the care, craft and subtlety of Love Letter is audible only in flashes on Write Me Back. Kelly seems to have breezed through the writing and recording process here, and there's a fine line between breezy and half-assed. (At least the crummy parts of Kelly's older albums had a misguided messianic ambition behind them.) The cheap faux-orchestrations are back, too, and they sound especially shabby backing the total conviction of Kelly's engaged vocal performances.
"Love Is" comes off like a handful of hacks in an off-strip Vegas bar, armed with a couple of Casios and a surprisingly good frontman, doing their best Barry White impression for a bunch of disinterested daytime drunks. By the end of the song, Kelly is willing himself back to the high "Soul Train" era, trying to turn its ersatz disco into the real deal. The fact that he almost succeeds gives you some indication, right at the album's start, that the pleasures of Write Me Back are based almost entirely around Kelly's pipes.
"Green Light" is the type of deep cut covered in Eric Harvey's recent history of quiet storm radio, and Kelly's vocal is as creamy as any of those classics. It's one of those songs that needs just enough quiver behind the la-la-la's to induce shivers without breaking the low-key mood by oversinging. When he wants to rock the people in the balcony, he's still got it. The lyrics to "When a Man Lies" may be boilerplate-- the wise old soulman castigating the faithless and two-faced-- but wow, does he sell that chorus. Still, it'd be nice if the music had half as much force.
Surprisingly, given his depth of knowledge and the more-or-less good taste displayed on Love Letter's old-school pastiches, the true low points on Write Me Back come when Kelly tries to recreate the 60s, again mostly because the results are so damned chintzy. "All Rounds on Me" is like a 1997 ringtone version of a Wilson Pickett obscurity with tinny synthetic horns clanging against surprisingly accurate guitar licks. The lowest-of-the-low is "Party Jumpin'", which comes directly after the somnambulant smoothness of "Green Light" like someone slapping you awake. And then pouring warm beer on you. Not even Kelly's singing can redeem this epically crappy-sounding tribute to dance crazes, "American Bandstand", and the end of every beach-party movie ever.
These cut-rate production choices are, along with the limpness of some of his retro moves, the only ways that Kelly actually embarrasses himself on Write Me Back. Which may be better than the days when he had you questioning his basic mental fitness. Still, given the glimmer of an end-to-end great album we got on Love Letter, it's hard not to be disappointed that unevenness is once again the name of R. Kelly's game.
