Music

Kelis is back! Hooray! Sort of! The truth is that the latest album from everyone’s favourite leftfield R&B star isn’t up to her usual mind-bending standard. Sure, it’s an object lesson in not giving a fuck, which is surely pop music’s one commandment – ‘I Don’t Think So’, for example, sounds like an obscene hard rock Abba fronted by Millie Jackson. But the album as a whole is marred by Kelis’s overdependence on a rap-singing delivery that just isn’t strong enough to carry some of the sub-standard instrumentals. It could do with some of the fire-bellied screaming of ‘Caught Out There’ (the ‘I hate you so much right now’ song, if you don’t remember). It could also have done without over-rated Black Eyed Pea Will.I.Am using it as a dumping ground for the leftover beats from his day job (cf. ‘’Til The Wheels Fall Off’). The Neptunes were obviously too busy protesting against the downgrading of Pluto’s planetary status to help out their old pal.

Another Will.I.Am-produced dog, ‘What’s That Right There’ heralds a slump into processed slowies that sound, especially in the cases of ‘Living Proof’ and ‘Goodbyes’, strangely reminiscent of a nu-jack Lenny Kravitz. Still, the record ends on a high with ‘Fuck Them Bitches (Clean)’, a hater-baiter which, despite its title, makes a comedic virtue of self-censorship. But ultimately this is the kind of record that made iTunes’ pay-per-track format such a success.