Categories : Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 2.5 / 5 Reviewer: Andrew Mitchell |
Just as Jackson’s last release of original recordings, 2001’s Invincible, was met with a tepid response for its mediocrity, his first posthumous release, Michael, deserves much the same for its redundancy. Granted, it’s unfair to make a comparison between an album made up entirely of vault recordings to one of those notoriously manicured official Jackson opuses, the genuine lack of artistic progression on either stands as a testament to how little anything fresh Jackson contributed musically the last 15 years of his life.
There’s not a track on ‘Michael’ that doesn’t demand a direct comparison to one of Jackson’s previous hits. Just as ‘Monster,’ Jackson’s vilification of blood thirsty paparazzi evokes ‘Thriller’ with its abundant trademark screams and squeals, ‘Hold My Hand’ and ‘Keep Your Head Up’ with their saccharine message and soaring choral tracks call forth the likes of ‘Heal The World’ or ‘Man In The Mirror.’ Every Jackson album had its obligatory rock vocal performance and like ‘Dirty Diana’ or his cover of the Beatles’ ‘Come Together,’ the Lenny Kravitz collaboration ‘I Can’t Make It Another Day’ aims to fill the bill here. If you take out the beat boxing intro on ‘Hollywood Tonight,’ leave in the bass riff and take it down a major third you’ll be left with a backing track alarmingly similar to ‘Billie Jean.’ And then there’s the string-filled closer with obligatory harmonica bridge, ‘Much Too Soon’; This may be the closest Jackson ever came to replicating childhood hit, ‘Ben.’
Rather than release more artistically progressive albums along the lines of evolutionary recordings Thriller and Off The Wall, latter day Jackson seemed bent on extracting heavily from his past work. The recordings on Michael support the hypothesis that Jackson may have felt the pressure to achieve blockbuster after blockbuster by using his greatest successes as a base. Sadly, this album of second rate replicas, Jackson himself didn’t feel were releasable, may have revealed more than he wanted us to know.
