A single phrase—“Bo selecta”—encapsulates both the peak and the nadir of the British singer Craig David’s career. It was the anthemic refrain of his breakout performance on the Artful Dodger’s 1999 garage classic “Rewind”—a song that launched David to instant stardom, followed by his 2000 debut, Born to Do It, released when he was just 19. (A decade later, it remained the fastest-selling debut album by a male solo artist in the UK.) David soon crossed over into the U.S. charts with “Fill Me In” and “7 Days,” showing how UK club music, hip-hop, R&B, and pop could all intermingle. But it was “Bo’ Selecta!”—a TV show in which the stand-up comedian Leigh Francis donned an obnoxious rubber mask to play the singer—that soon set the singer’s career on a downward spiral.
After a questionable album of Motown covers, Craig David decamped to Miami, where he no doubt heard the blueprint for his hybrid hits revisited by artists like Drake and Justin Bieber. But he was greeted as a survivor by the UK press with 2016’s Following My Intuition, and now he follows up with his seventh album, The Time Is Now. At this point, though he is only 36, David occupies the role of something like an elder statesman, having weathered both a cultural backlash and a collaboration with Sting. But outside of a few tracks where he sounds reinvigorated, he’s not quite sure how to fit in to the present pop landscape.
The Time Is Now finds Craig David fishing for a current trend—or three—to sink his hooks into, and across 15 tracks, he lands a few. He teams up with producer Jonas Blue (responsible for that tropical house remake of “Fast Car”) for the bantamweight “Heartline,” where his purr melds into the downy backdrop of tropical-house marimbas and defanged ratchet snares. It all might blow away at the slightest gust did the singer not convey just enough emotional heft to keep it grounded.
David is most successful when he finds collaborators who push him into new territory. Kaytranada makes a slick R&B groove hiccup for “Live in the Moment,” while D.C. rapper GoldLink’s double-time delivery adds a bit of grit to the singer’s honeyed hook. However unintentionally, the fact that he has known both the highs and lows of fame makes David’s carpe diem advice actually feel earned. But on “I Know You,” David acts like someone who has mistakenly stumbled into the EDM tent. Part of the blame falls to producer Fraser T. Smith, who has credits on five of the album’s tracks. While his production for Adele and Stormzy shows that Smith can do both anthemic pop and rugged grime tracks, here, and on songs like “Love Me Like It’s Yesterday,” he falls back on tired tropes like generic filter sweeps and door-chime keys.
Breezy tropical house, Latin-tinged stabs at replicating “Despacito,” EDM-friendly drops, Auto-Tuned croons—David dabbles in all of it like a man half his age. Consider “For the Gram,” a car crash of his most cringeworthy tendencies. Singing about Instagram, he awkwardly attempts to out-Drake Drake (whose own blend of hip-hop and R&B itself owes something to David’s turn-of the century suavity) with lines about hashtags, emoji, and sliding into DMs. For an album called The Time Is Now, David spends too much of his time looking like he's trying to catch up.
