If you really want to get where Mayer Hawthorne's coming from, it's not enough to just check out his first two studio albums, A Strange Arrangement and How Do You Do. Those records got retro-soul revivalist tags stapled on to them, thanks to a hip-hop fiend's sense of vintage soul that drew heavily off Stax/Motown goodwill vibes. But the real scope of his musical influences jump out on the 2011 covers EP, Impressions, where his classic R&B leanings ran the gamut from the well-loved Isleys to the obscure Festivals. He also made a point of taking on some of his blue-eyed soul contemporaries-- artists like Chromeo and Jon Brion, who work adjacent to R&B and funk without necessarily binding themselves to it. If integrating those attributes meant Hawthorne took on multiple pop lineages at once in order to establish a unique identity of his own, it's served him well so far.
As he keeps moving forward and adds on new dimensions to his repertoire, Hawthorne's new album, Where Does This Door Go, gives him a lot of self-imposed leeway. Here he cedes his usual production duties to an all-star cast. There's Cee-Lo collaborator and Plantlife funkateer Jack Splash, Oak of pop-rap/R&B production superteam Pop & Oak, producer-to-the-stars Greg Wells and-- most prominent of all-- Pharrell Williams, who shares Hawthorne's eccentric depth and enthusiasm for modernized, chronology-twisting sounds. That Hawthorne's wrangled this crew into a consistently engaged sound is to his credit, where his impact is tangible enough that the committee effect takes a backseat.
Hawthorne deliberately shaking his throwback rep is probably the best thing you could expect from Where Does This Door Go: the songs sound clean and of the now, aided by people who successfully mine the last couple generations' best pop ideas. That this music sounds sly without actually feeling like a joke is impressive-- there's too much practiced musicianship in songs like the breezy quiet storm*-via-Private Eyes “Backseat Lover” or the N.E.R.D.-does-Aja* bounce of “Reach Out Richard". This wouldn't be the first review comparing Hawthorne's sensibility to '77 Steely Dan or '81 Hall & Oates, but those admittedly fitting touchstones mean that even through production proxies, he's springboarding off of artists who were already looking at the horizon and the rearview at the same time. Retro isn't the same thing as timeless, and this album trades up in taking that second route.
It helps that Hawthorne's improved noticeably as a singer. Once a tolerably flat if charismatic vocalist, he's expanded his range and his confidence. His falsetto's finally started to resonate as charmingly vulnerable instead of just withdrawn, he's gotten better at sounding eccentric without forcing it (dig the way he casually rolls off the oddball pronunciation of “Chris-ti-an-Di-or” on “Wine Glass Woman”), and his penchant for interjecting f-bombs in otherwise sweetly sung lyrics comes across more frankly sincere than gratuitously snotty. Those lyrics are more straightforward than ever: Like a lot of the music he's called back to over the years, it's stuff that lives and dies on its delivery. He can fit in some neat turns of phrase; “She walks into a room and all the lights flicker violently” is a vivid way to start “The Innocent”. But just as many songs attempt to build a lot out of a little, like the yearbook-quote simplicity of teenage weekend bender anthem “The Stars Are Ours” (“Well we're breakin' all the rules/ 'cause they're getting in the way/ And we'll never be as young as we are today”) or the bad-sex-as-tired-machinery conceit of “Robot Love". Still, it never gets cringingly obvious enough to feel like the performance can't redeem the ordinary-at-worst lyrics.
Where Does This Door Go is a record that's equally focused on delivering mildly self-effacing party jams and empathetic moments of connection. Women are both predatory seductresses to be avoided (“The Innocent”) and sympathetic done-wrong figures to identify with (the Jessie Ware-featuring “Her Favorite Song”). Moments of post-hedonistic defensiveness (“Crime,” which Kendrick Lamar reliably owns) are followed by an apologetic yet reassuring monologue to his father (“Reach Out Richard”). Inconsistency or complexity? Depends on how much you believe in this music as sincere self-expression versus its status as smartly crafted, artist-as-listener-proxy pop. Three albums in to a late-blooming career, it's getting easier and easier to picture Hawthorne, a DJ-turned-singer and fan-turned-musician, pulling off both.
