For several days, Lotusflow3r/MPLSound sat on my hard drive, daring me to click play. I finally acquiesced, knowing this review was due, and suddenly realized how much my relationship with Prince has changed over the past 20 years. His rise to success, beginning with 1979's Prince, pretty much mirrored my pre-adolescent development as a music fan. By 1987's Sign O' the Times, I was ripping the cellophane off the cassingles when barely out of the store, hoping to soak up a little of that Princely aura even if it would be hours before I'd be near my tape deck.
Like many who came of age when each new Prince album expanded our conception of pop, I've already struggled through plenty of self-cannibalized sketches and ever-more-mawkish ballads and unsuccessful experiments to locate the canon-worthy songs lurking in his decade-plus of hubristic over-production. I know a jumble of decent tunes, lackluster jams, and outright dreck invariably awaits on any Tuesday morning bearing a new Prince album. This time around, and in several key ways, we get a partial throwback to the Prince records I greedily inhaled as a tween. (For one thing I bought a physical copy at a chain department store, something I haven't regularly done since I could drive.) That added a little twist to my distress when I realized that, at age 31, I was actually kind of dreading my first play of a new Prince album. It's a future the 12-year-old me would not have wanted to reach.
Assessing a new Prince album all but demands forced objectivity and willfully ignoring his first decade as a recording artist. Want to look like an idiot? Write a screed lamenting the fact that an artist has failed to consistently entertain, let alone surprise or enlighten, for over 30 years. But what's left, once you choose the road of sane detachment, other than a review that can be summed up as "predictably imperfect, your mileage may vary"? Hence my low-level dread. So here's my hardly original thesis, which many could have guessed even before clicking: Don't buy this album unless you're willing to do the work of winnowing it down to the tracks you find enjoyable/passable. Two new Prince albums (plus a third disc we'll get to in a minute) for the price of one might as well come with a giant sparkly sticker that reads "For Obsessive Amateur Editors Only." Filler on a 21st century Prince album? Do purple pontiffs leave paisley piles in the Minnesota woods?
Lotusflow3r is mostly neutral funk-rock. When I say "funk-rock," I don't mean the taut, digitally enhanced amalgam Prince invented/perfected in the 1980s. I mean the looser variety, amenable to extended onstage takes, that friend and foe alike would describe as "organic," albeit with very different inflections. It's a sound that works best when he observes three important guidelines: 1) He restrains the stock guitar heroics (has anyone's instrumental creativity been more effectively hampered by being repeatedly declared the last great virtuoso?), 2) He keeps the tempos club-friendly (or at least friendly in the context of old-school weekend at the 40-and-over spot), and 3) He remembers his faux rivalry with fellow funkateer Morris Day was more productive than his imagined rivalry with musically ignorant young folks.
But when I say "neutral," unfortunately I mean pretty much exactly what you probably think I mean. The only track with an immediately memorable hook is his cover of "Crimson and Clover", which would be sadder if he hadn't been obscuring his preternatural catchiness for some time now. On Lotusflow3r, as on all of his albums since he became a classicist by intent and a live workhorse out of necessity, Prince mistakenly assumes instrumental prowess to be of primary importance to anyone other than online guitar-tab traders, while also displaying an unflattering and near-constant need to prove he can hang with the multi-cultural heroes who shaped his worldview. There's no need to genuflect when you've long since been admitted to the pantheon.
If Lotusflow3r is generic and too-reverential modern day muso Prince, then MPLSound is either crass or delusional. It's crass if it's a conceptual cash-grab, Prince bald-facedly pastiching his own 80s sound as a profitable parlor game. Times being vice-tight, presumably even for those with the renewable resource of a deep catalog of hall-of-fame hits, dusting off the drum machine makes a certain sad sense, and a by-numbers ballad like "Here" sounds undeniably better backed by its twee little keyboard hook than, like, a flute. It's delusional if he's serious, because it means he thinks these flimsy self-homages wouldn't sound anemic next to tunes from Purple Rain or Parade, which you can at least write off as the kind of perception-free baloney we expect from geniuses of his stripe.
Either way, MPLSound is (surprise) momentarily enjoyable and completely inessential, happy to provoke Palovian responses since the hard work of honestly juicing your head, heart, or hips is antithetical to the whole idea. Sure, you can still sieve off a few decent tracks for your "Prince in the Aughts" playlist; the Camille redux of "Dance 4 Me" is my personal choice, if only because he tries to shoehorn in all of the sex/religion/androgyne clichés. But while I'd pick electro-funk Prince over jazz-funk Prince every day of the week, the proximity of Lotusflow3r makes the pleasures of MPLSound feel even more hollow, like it's merely a spoonful of synth-driven sugar designed to sell naysayers on the non-electronic new stuff Prince wants you to cherish as much as the old faves.
Elixer, the aforemetioned third disc, is actually by newcomer Bria Valente, who should at least be happy she's been able to piggyback her way to bad reviews in national publications, rather than languishing in the promo bin purgatory to which she'd be consigned if her producer was a cousin with a copy of Pro Tools. Elixer runs the gamut of bland-but-classy R&B, from antiseptic slow jams to rote dance-pop, slick as you'd expect and completely failing to suggest what bunched Prince's panties when he initially discovered Valente. Many of Prince's pet projects have been little more than ventriloquist's dummies-- excepting skilled musicians like Sheila E. or irrepressible lunatics like Morris Day, the master hasn't had much patience for personality-driven showboats-- but any trace of weirdness or wit or actual eroticism has seemingly been purged from Valente's performance at Jehovah's request, which reflects worse on egomaniacal producer than nominal artiste in this case. Like some depressing footnote to the whole Lotusflow3r/MPLSound experience, Elixer sparked my final sad realization about my current relationship with Prince and his product: Who knew I'd one day get wistful for the vacuous but honestly carnal fluff of "Sex Shooter"?
