All right, quick personality test — a couple years ago you may or may not have peed on an underage girl. An alleged sex tape of you committing statutory rape is leaked online and you spend the greater portion of the decade trying to reclaim your innocence. Good news — you’re acquitted on all 14 counts. The public watches in fervent anticipation to see what your next move is. What do you do?
Most people would probably lay low, play it innocent for a while and not pee on anybody. For those of you that answered, “I would unleash a 15-track ode to sex,” congrats, your personality type is “R. Kelly.”
Untitled — the 10th album from the man who calls himself “Sexasaurus” — is, thematically, business as usual for R. Kelly. Structurally, Untitled marks a record amount of collaborations for R. Kelly in terms of production and guest artists. Unfortunately, this does nothing to prevent one of the most surprising disappointments for the album. The sound is pervasively monotonous.
The unique sound that R. Kelly perfected in prior mega-hits like “Ignition (Remix)” is almost wholly exchanged for the synthetic claps and smooth, sparse production of his standard R&B procedure. In the first half, every track from “Exit” to “Number One” is virtually indistinguishable, a problem only exacerbated by the one-track lyrics.
Among the mid-tempo sex ballads, most entertaining is “Bangin’ the Headboard” with its “Ignition”-esque chorus. Individually, there’s every reason to believe that each track is competent enough to succeed as a single, but their collective effect comes off as insincere, robbing the album of its guilty fun.
Unsurprisingly, the album reaches its highest points when R. Kelly innovates. The album begins a three-song stride halfway through with the Usher-like “I Love the DJ,” one of the few songs with any kind of driving force. The stride continues into album anomaly with “Supaman High,” a song bearing the pummeling, semi-retarded swagger of Three 6 Mafia. With some contextually distressing help from OJ da Juiceman, R. Kelly takes the albums only break from sex to explain two other critical aspects of his life: balling and getting fucked up.
The majority of the songs on the album suggest that R. Kelly has checked out, flippantly churning out singles only because it allows him to continue balling. Subsequent track “Be My #2” is, paradoxically, where R. Kelly finally sounds like he is having fun and brings a Jay-Z level of confidence sans the douchiness. With a life-affirming touch of brass and bass, the song sounds like something Jamiroquai might’ve done if they were less concerned with dancing and more concerned with erections. The song manages to simultaneously update R&B and disco and contains either the best or worst response to a statutory rape accusation ever: “To all you hatin’ mothafuckahs/ Slap, slap, slap, slap.”
Otherwise, the only redeeming attributes of the album are those brief moments of respite in which R. Kelly comes off as endearing. In the early track “Echo,” R. Kelly claims he wants to make you “scream and moan” after which he proceeds to yodel. Throw in lines like “You make me hot like a toaster” and “like the ‘R’ in ‘R&B’/ You’s a big deal” and it’s clear that R. Kelly hasn’t lost his inexplicable lyrical genius.
In the end, Untitled is just another entry into a general trend of eschewing the album in favor of the single. Apart from “Be My #2,” the album contains nothing that previous R. Kelly fans would find superior to his established work. But, after all, R. Kelly has no reason to change. He has an established fan base and knows what kind of songs they want. R. Kelly rules a unique niche in history where the pleasures are never guilty, the sex is always good and the Sexasaurus never goes extinct.
2 1/2 stars out of 5.
