Music

‘I have trouble having sex to music,’ said Justin in a recent interview. ‘I start listening hard and picking out the chords…’

This, in a nutshell, is The Justin Timberlake Paradox: the tension between the sexually voracious 25-year-old known to the world as ‘Trousersnake’ and the ferret-faced nerd who wants us to take him seriously as an R&B artiste. It was apparent when we saw him touring his 2002 solo debut ‘Justified’ – half an hour in, thousands of teenage girls would stop screaming and suddenly look rather bewildered as Justin’s band launched into another ten-minute Latin-funk jam.

The follow-up album sees Justin’s increasingly priapic lyrics tempered by his ambitious desire to create a futuristic brand of proggy R&B. As well as employing the Quincy Jones-ish jazz-funk of ‘Justified’, producers Rick Rubin and Timbaland enlarge Justin’s sonic palette by invoking early ’90s rave culture, squeaky ’80s synth-funk and curious gothic hip hop breakbeats.

Judging by a single playback at the Sony offices (where Her Majesty’s Music Press were all but surrounded by armed guards), there are at least three corkers here. You’ll know the single ‘SexyBack’, which sounds like Duke Ellington’s ‘Caravan’ as rendered by Spank Rock; there’s also Will.I.Am’s infectiously funky ‘Damn Girl’; and Rick Rubin’s piano-led gospel epic ‘Another Song’. Elsewhere it’s a bit more confusing. There are too many sludgy digital ballads, including ‘Losing My Way’, an earnest quasi-religious parable about a small-town crack addict. More curious is ‘My Love’, a rave-tinged revisitation of ‘Cry Me A River’ in which Justin baits a certain ex-girlfriend who cheated on him and is now getting her just deserts (‘now he’s doing to you/what you did to me’).

Other tracks pointlessly graft together two completely disparate songs. Some start promisingly, like the Roger Troutman-ish synth-funk of ‘Sexy Ladies’, which suddenly swerves off into marching band territory; or the Aaliyah-ish orchestral synths of ‘Summer Love’, which segues into a cheesy loverman ballad. You couldn’t imagine anyone having sex to this without getting very confused indeed.