Michael Jackson new album Xscape: first listen
Bernadette McNulty gives her verdict on the forthcoming Michael Jackson album Xscape, a collection of eight 'new' songs featuring production by Timbaland
Was the surprise news that Michael Jackson was about to release an album nearly five years after his death inspired by Kate Bush’s return? I like to think of him hanging out in the never-ending Neverland that is the afterlife and on hearing the news that an Eighties chart contemporary had sold-out 22 nights at the Hammersmith Apollo in 15 minutes, wanted to remind people how in that summer of 2009, he was about to embark on a 50-date run at the O2. Take that Bush I can hear him saying.
Not that I imagine Jackson to be bitter about his eternal confinement across the river Styx (I’m not sure Hades provides many recording studios) – but I see him more as fiercely competitive and as committed to being a singing superstar as he was in life.
And it was exactly those qualities that I was reminded of on the first listen for his new posthumous album, called Xscape, set to be released in May.
Appropriately, even the setting for the playback had a foot in the past. In the basement of a swanky Knightsbridge hotel, drinks flowed amongst the smoke mirrored walls and white leather couches as the label chief and DJ Trevor Nelson pumped up the crowd. It was as if the economic implosion of the record industry over the last fifteen years had never happened, let alone the fact that the stars of today, from Kanye West to Beyonce, are more likely to just throw their albums on the internet overnight than do anything as recherche as arrange a listening party.
Still, in the reality of the present, bouncers confiscated our phones and more bizarrely, the record was played through the sound system via the brand of mobile the album is sponsored by. Apparently this was to give us an elevated sonic experience but it sounded fairly similar to the clanging, bass-heavy din of any overamplified iPhone speaker. Not that anything felt particularly sacrilegious about this corporate alliance. Again, Jackson was an early and enthusiastic pioneer of hooking up with global brands; I doubt he would have been doing anything different now.
What the quality of the sound couldn’t diminish though was the pristine, front-and-centre presence of Jackson’s voice in the mix. The singer’s posthumous releases, particularly the 2010 compilation Michael, have ironically only served to make Jackson feel more dead, the lifeless songs lurching and thudding with the grace of Frankenstein’s monster, animated purely by brute studio (and commercial) force rather than organic impulses.
Xscape at least sounds more like a labour of love and with only eight songs, a judiciously edited and cohesive album rather than an endless memory-stick jumble of offcuts. Former US X Factor judge LA Reid has overseen the process, working his way through four decades of unused recordings that Jackson has left behind. Employing a premier league team of top name pop producers, Reid has called the reboot ‘contemporizing’ Jackson’s songs, a euphemism that even Bernard Matthews might balk at when faced with the processed nature of these recordings. But the balance often feels quite subtle and even-handed between the original song and the new styles of orchestration and production.
From fashionable-again orchestral disco and propulsively lithe electro to Rodney Jerkin’s trademark militarised beats, you can still hear fully-formed Jackson songs there – even more striking in an age where RnB and pop has largely become a collage of chants and breakdowns. I just haven’t hadn’t heard this many words in a pop song for ages, let alone proper verses, bridges and choruses.
The only problem was that those verses, bridges and choruses made up songs that ultimately didn’t make the final cut of his classic albums. Sometimes it’s interesting to see the rough cuts and working out of an artist, to trace your finger along the arduous and often confused process by which something is made from nothing. Incredible pop music though tends to emerge much more fitfully and often between the undocumented interplay between different people.
These songs all sounded like prototypes – that one a bit like Wanna Be Starting Something, the next, a distant cousin of The Way She Makes Me Feel, and if anything, they start to reveal some of the limited templates that Jackson worked with: the Jackson 5 good-time funk disco number; the bashful choirboy ballad; the angry, despairing epic. The lyrics, perhaps the critical thing in the magic of the final Jackson mix, often so strange and mantra-like, sounded on these songs forgettable generic, bar one that asked, Michael Gove-like, if you knew where your children were at midnight if they weren’t at home.
But it was still a kind of wonder to hear that man-woman voice so utterly unlike any other, rude with vitality and power, flying through the octaves while simultaneously punctuating itself with those inimitable yelps and shrieks. And the producers seem to have responded in kind, digging out some of their most glistening beats and loops to burnish and embroider Jackson’s singing.
Perhaps because this record does sound like it was at least made with some kind of love it felt quite poignant. What album would Jackson be making now I wondered? Would he still be stuck in the stylistic rut of his final work or would he have been rescued by Daft Punk and created some fresh miracle? The record producers sound like they are asking themselves the same questions, if not arriving at any answer.
In the room, a strange portrait of Jackson hung down over us, most of his head clamped silently in a glitter dust trumpet while his eyes peer over the top, both mournful and defiant. The pregnant lady next to me rubbed her tummy. “The baby must love this,” she said, “they are going wild.” With Jackson, life obviously goes on.
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