Album review: Michael Jackson, Michael

Published on Thursday 9 December 2010 17:48

MICHAEL JACKSON: MICHAEL EPIC, £12.99 **

Eighteen months after his death, Michael Jackson is still courting controversy and engendering the sort of conspiracy theorising normally reserved for terrorist plots.

Michael, a posthumous compilation masquerading as his first "new" studio album since 2001's Invincible, comprises recordings and spruced-up demos dating as far back as the Thriller sessions in 1982, plus reassembled fragments of music from various periods, as well as a series of vocal performances that many have suggested are not Jackson - one newspaper reported that an impersonator from Italy was claiming that he secretly entered a studio in Switzerland "after being approached by a man, whom he thinks was from Bahrain", where he proceeded to record some guide vocals in the style of Jackson, whereupon he was paid "E2,000 per track".

Jackson's record company, Epic, were so concerned about the rumours surrounding Michael that they issued a press release underscoring the legitimacy of the music's provenance: before his death, Jackson, they assured us, "had left behind a unique roadmap mapping out his creative vision in the form of notes and detailed conversations with the people he was working with as well as those he was planning to work with".

They proceeded to invite six of Jackson's former producers and engineers who had worked with the star over the past 30 years, including influential "swingbeat" pioneer Teddy Riley (producer on 1991's Dangerous, 1995's HIStory and Invincible), to verify the authenticity of the singing, which they duly did. And finally, Epic drafted in "two of the nation's preeminent forensic musicologists in the United States" to independently evaluate the tracks "using audio analysis". Both concluded that "the lead vocals analysed were those of Michael".

There is a tawdriness to the stories behind Michael that can't help affecting one's judgment of it. Bizarrely, several of the songs were apparently recorded at the New Jersey home of a hotel manager, Dominic Cascio, whose sons Eddie and Frank were being mentored by the singer - as epic encounters between performer and producer go, it's hardly Jackson meets Quincy Jones at LA's Westlake Studios for the Thriller sessions.

Indeed, Michael is no match for Jackson's historic, record-breaking best work; much of it, in fact, would have struggled to make the cut for Invincible, widely considered to be his weakest album, even a commercial flop, despite selling a staggering 13 million copies worldwide.

It opens with the single Hold My Hand, a duet with Akon originally recorded in 2007 for the latter artist's own album.Jackson's voice sounds lower, less fever-pitched, than usual, and even with some of his vocal mannerisms, it could be any number of Auto-Tuned pop acts singing trite words of devotion over gloopy R&B.

Hollywood Tonight is a remnant from the Invincible sessions and resembles a faster You Rock My World, only with a more predictable melody and a decades-old New Jack Swing rhythm that outstays its welcome by several minutes - only the trademark fricative splutters remind you that this is Jackson, because on the verses and chorus it hardly sounds like him. Keep Your Head Up is an anaemic ballad from those Cascio sessions with a pseudo-gospel chorus - a latterday She's Out Of My Life or Human Nature it is not.

Far better is (I Like) The Way You Love Me, a demo of which appeared on the Ultimate Collection in 2004 and here comes with added multitracked harmonies. Lyrically banal in its presentation of a romantic idyll that would be far-fetched for a normal adult male, let alone one with the problems endured by Michael Jackson, nevertheless this piece of finger-clicking neo-doowop is divine, and the ascending key changes towards the end are arresting.

The joint venture with rapper 50 Cent, Monster, is less successful. An attempt at a Thriller-style blockbuster, with screams and glass-shattering FX and big beat, it's total schlock, like a karaoke impression of the real thing. Another ballad, this one relatively unadorned, Best Of Joy exposes the vocal to scrutiny and, the fact is, it scarcely resembles Jackson. The lyrics are so trite they're almost surreal. "I am forever," coos Jackson, to which I am moved to respond: "Evidently, you are not."

Breaking News is one of those Jackson tracks that find him obsessing about ill-treatment at the hands of the press, over bog-standard funk-pop, his voice comically sibilant and lispy, with a "hee-hee-hee" towards the end that suggests Avid Merrion was on hand in the studio.

There would appear to be an attempt to give Michael an autobiographical coherence, with titles such as (I Can't Make It) Another Day and Behind The Mask (the latter featuring a backing track by Japanese electro-poppers Yellow Magic Orchestra), and closing track Much Too Soon, but Jackson didn't do excoriating soul-searching, he was "merely" the finest purveyor of polished pop on the planet, and this collection does his reputation no favours at all.

This album sounds utterly out of date and unaware of any trends in R&B since 1988. It is crying out for some of the avant-garde invention of the Neptunes, Timbaland, Swizz Beatz or The-Dream - and generally serves his memory as poorly as the most ruthlessly cynical posthumous cash-in.