Search - Usher :: 8701

Ushers First Come Back

Andre S. Grindle | Brewer Maine | 02/07/2010

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Having listened to precious little Usher over the years I always more or less wrote the guy off as a very generic new jack era singer whose voice and style was interchangable with dozens of other peoples'. As it turns out the issue isn't as simple as that. Because of the generally cookie cutter nature of R&B today it's safe to say that not only is there little room for experimentation but the highest expectations of the listener is much much lower. After a relatively long absense from the record racks since his breakthrough album My Way he returns with this album. Well times have changed some and he could no longer depend on a youth oriented audience for support so he decides to go for heavy hip-hop oriented approch with bigger beats and guest raps from P.Diddy. Despite songwriting contributions from Jam/Lewis and Usher's own writing and production talents this album somehow manages to collect one R&B clishe of it's era. Few of the songs have much construction,there's a repetitious flavor to the arrangements,the orchestration is synthesized to a huge degree-it's all here. Now that's not to say R&B artists have to keep relying on 70's and/or 80's style instrumentation to survive but in the current R&B environment requires that a talented artist has to have a very strong individual identity to make it work for them. For some reason I cannot explain Usher lacks that sense of identity at this point. His gruff,soulful vocal intonations and good songwriting IDEAS aside he goes from one song to the other on this album not really finding a flavor and sound that uniquely represents him. Sometimes when this happens you can forgive it due to the weakness of the artist. But for someone of Usher's abilities,especially on uptempo tunes such as "Twork It Out","U Got It Bad" as well as smoother grooves such a "Can U Help Me" and "Good 'Ol Ghetto" you can clearly see he was just missing an element that made him a standout. Overall this album is solid:nothing truly awful on it but...not really a lot of noteworthy music that's all that seperate from a lot of other albums that came out around the same time. It's dynamite at a party I suppose but as casual listening,parts start to drag and in every way possible Usher had nowhere to go but up from here because sometimes an empty area of a puzzle will prompt you to find that crucial missing piece."