Y2K is back and Justin Timberlake is the asterisk on the trend report, left in the dirt like skinny scarves and fedoras. The ex-NSYNC frontman's stuttering electro-pop, kissed with silky millennial R&B, produced at least one album of all time with 2006 FutureSex/LoveSounds. But after a decade of marginally audible music, hindsight suggests that despite his talents as a performer, Timberlake was also simply in the right place at the right time to capitalize on Timbaland's mid-'00s hot streak or prevent Michael Jackson's rejection. for his 2002 debut Justified.
Timberlake's sixth album, Everything I thought it was, designed to smooth out the dents in his public image in the wake of his ex-girlfriend Britney Spears' recent memoir. He wrote that he encouraged her to have an abortion, told the media that she was a “fraud whore and a liar” and generally acted even worse than you'd imagine a sharp white guy prone to talking to the AAB. In an interview to promote the album's first single 'Selfish', a cheeky mea culpa directed at the 'owner of my heart and all my scars', aka his wife of 12 years Jessica Biel, Timberlake spoke admiringly of music that reveals men's emotions. . Referring to Donny Hathaway's cover of 'Jealous Guy,' he told Zane Lowe, 'You just don't hear that often from men, that they would express an emotion that makes them vulnerable. Growing up the way I did, you learn not to do that.”
Timberlake's reading of modern pop might have rang true half a decade ago, but today's airwaves are full of men talking about feelings, and last year's biggest songs by male artists were luscious country ballads. No one really wants to hear about gender from an artist who saw fit to name a 2013 single “Take Back the Night,” but softboy masculinity is a useful touchstone for an artist embarking on a redemption arc. Listening to his new album makes you feel as convincing as the radical pose he took in 2018 Man of the Woodsan album for the hypebeast whose hiking boots have never seen soil.
In the 77th minute, they were ruthless and effortless Everything I thought it was he does everything you thought Justin Timberlake did but worse. Unlike the story he told Lowe, the album stops short of grappling with his past, offering a lily of the valley for romantic, casual display. “Flame” is shot for the cinematic motion of “What Goes Around…Comes Around,” but trades off the complexity of FutureSex/LoveSoundsKarmic ballet to smooth radio piano, soundbank samples of siren sobs and incendiary metaphors piled up like dusty coals that will never catch. By the end of the song you're begging for something, anything to shake the song's eight producers off Timberlake's old bird-feeding triumphs.
