Charming, Sensual Confessions
Confessions by Usher
It must be nice to be Usher Raymond. He's 25, handsome, talented and seemingly has the world at his feet. He's got the #1 single in the country, his album's expected to do gangbusters. he's got two Grammy awards and he's even got a prism-style doppelganger in the form of one Justin Timberlake.
Yeah, the haters have a point. Justin's makeover from boy-band leader to respected pop/R&B artist had the footprints of Usher's 8701 all over it. Their voices are fairly similar, they both worked with The Neptunes, and both obviously worship at the altar of Michael Jackson. On Usher's fifth album, Confessions, the onetime teen idol still has an MJ fetish, but he juxtaposes Off The Wall era Michael's boyish charm with a very grown up sensuality, with the help of an all-star team of producers and writers.
Folks who like their R&B and hip-hop to be (primarily) separate will be happy to know that the hip-hoppery on here is kept to a bare minimum. Actually, the only cut on Confessions to contain any rhyming at all is first single Yeah!. This is a pure party track, featuring a charmingly rude rhyme from Ludacris and the hilariously annoying shouting of King Of Crunk Lil' Jon. Usher rides the beat like a bronco, imitating MJ's talent for percussive singing.
Yet another uptempo track, Caught Up rides a chanting-type vocal, a military-esque beat and some horns buried in the mix. It proves Usher definitely has a way with the uptempo tracks, unlike most of his contemporaries, who seem to be fast song-deficient.
Jermaine Dupri and Usher have a pretty good chemistry, which has been exhibited on several of Usher's biggest hits, like You Make Me Wanna... and U Got It Bad. Dupri's songs explore the "confessional" theme of the album. The title track (actually Part II. Part I is the interlude that precedes it) is a deceptively uptempo track on which Usher apologizes to his lady for getting another girl pregnant. It's hard to believe anyone could be forgiven for something like that, but if anyone can charm the sense out of a woman, I guess it'd be Usher. Burn is the flipside of U Got It Bad. Where on Bad, Usher was exploring the sort of helpless joy of falling in love, Burn is about what happens when the flame is flickering out, or as Usher puts it "when the party just ain't poppin' like it used to". It has the same Bic-waving hands in the air that U Got It Bad had.
There's much more. Truth Hurts rides a finger-snappin' summery groove straight to the bank of "are you cheatin' on me?". It's the best of several tracks provided by the always reliable Jam & Lewis, in association with former child-prodigy turned never-was Bobby Ross Avila. This album wouldn't be complete without an excursion into the sped-up soul sample, and Usher kills it on the amazing Throwback, where producer Just Blaze samples a healthy does of an old Dionne Warwick song (You're Gonna Need Me). The sample gives the song sort of a reflective, haunting quality, made even more so by Usher's increasingly strong vocal abilities.
For the bedroom, JD pulls out the old Linn drum machine and takes it back to the Prince International Lover days with the pulsating synth groove of Do It To Me. Can You Handle It is this album's supreme baby-making jam, recalling the best of post-Luther slow jams while sporting a sensually erotic edge that Luther was never quite able to attain. Usher skillfully glides up and down his register on this hushed, finger snappin' ballad, which was produced by the criminally underrated Robin Thicke. It's definitely one of those "light a candle and lay in front of the fireplace"-type jams.
Given the glut of production/writing teams on this album, it's a wonder that the album sounds cohesive, and the credit for that has to go to Usher himself. Vocally, the man has evolved into quite a singer. Each of his successive albums has been better than the previous one, and Usher improves on the high-water mark set by 8701, which is quite impressive — ESPECIALLY since he sidestepped surefire success by not using a Neptunes track, a superstar duet or more than one track with a guest rapper. Usher also widely sidesteps the typical R&B bling/pimpin' lyrics — on most of the tracks. And on the one track where he succumbs to obvious cliche — the electric guitar-spiced Bad Girl he turns it into a charmingly playful song as opposed to making it sound like every other R&B record out.
Even though there are a couple of tracks that blend anonymously into the mix, the album's only massive misstep is the overabundance of interludes. We don't need to hear a prelude to every other song, just give us the music, dammit!!
Five albums in, and he keeps improving. Confessions is certainly one of the better R&B albums of 2004 (and is the best selling R&B album of the decade so far, clocking in at an impressive 10 million sold).
