Prince Albums Thread

That's a great call with the Purple rain/Appolonia ...certainly has that Vibe .

 

I just saw parts of the show that Prince and the girls did at Montreux on 2013 and you can’t help to love them. Their faces showed them 3 were having the time of their life .

 

I do think 3rd eye was a talented group and would have loved the chance to see them live (to my great shame I never managed to see P live at all, and by the time I really got in to him UK gigs were thin on the ground). I also think some of the outakes not on the album could have added some more variety to the album proper

 

I did the early dash too to get copies of both, and a relative did the same for me so i have duplicates. Planet Earth falls short of 3121, but some tracks (Lion of Judah, Guitar, title track) are better than the weakest from 3121. 20Ten album was disappointing by comparison. I need to relisten as only Act of God ever stood out. I don't think re-releases of either are essential.

Tonight's playlist dozen was:
Dirty Mind / Lady Cab Driver / God (Love Theme...) / Around The World In A Day (Version 1) / Forever In My Life / What's My Name / One Of Us / Everlasting Now / Lion Of Judah / Givin' Em What They Love / Baltimore / Big City

 

I also liked Prince’s new look with his Afro during his final years, he was still effortlessly cool.

 

Great!!

 

Art Official Age (2014), NPG/Warner Bros.



Track listing:

1. ART OFFICIAL CAGE
2. CLOUDS
3. BREAKDOWN
4. THE GOLD STANDARD
5. U KNOW
6. BREAKFAST CAN WAIT
7. THIS COULD BE US
8. WHAT IT FEELS LIKE
9. affirmation I & II
10. WAY BACK HOME
11. FUNKNROLL
12. TIME
13. affirmation III

I don't know who Andy Allo or Lianne La Havas are, but I can't say they left a huge impression on me despite appearing on a collective total of five songs. And that's not the only thing I didn't know I forgot about this album. The first few songs and interludes establish this concept of Prince waking up after 45 years in suspended animation.
That's a pretty cool idea for an album. I just wish he committed to it a little more. I'm not entirely clear on what, say, BREAKFAST CAN WAIT has to do with suspended animation.
But anyway, what opinions do you have on this album?
Would you recommend it with or without a caveat?

 

I love this album - solid come back and definite leap forward sound wise. Shows P keeping up with trends right to near the end. Great collection of songs.

Neither Lianne La Havas or Andy Allo make much of an impression in this album (mainly because their contributions are mainly the spoken word segue bits - seems largely a case of them being around at the time and P saying ‘would ya mind reading this’), but don’t let that dissuade you from checking them out. Lianne La Havas is a U.K. r&b/soul act who’s produced two fantastic albums to date and who Prince was a fan of - they’re definitely worth checking out. Andy Allo was Prince protege and he’s the creative force behind her superconductor album and did a great acoustic covers set with her (her singing, him on acoustic guitar) that was available very briefly on tidal then disappeared and has never re-emerged through legitimate channels. She’s now one of the leads in the TV show Upload which is worth a watch.

 

Does anyone recommend Superconductor by Andy Allo? I've considered buying it after reading a couple of fairly kind reviews, and she looks suitably 1999-era Princesque on the cover which i liked. Is there a very obvious influence from her mentor or does she carve her own unique groove so to speak?

 

AOA was a nice collection of songs, but it isn´t a killer album. Much diverse and fun than Electrum , for sure. It includes, Breakdown, one of the finest, later day, Prince songs.

 

Of the protege albums released around that time I'd say Judith Hill's Back In Time betters it and my preference is for the live acoustic album Oui Can Love (not sure why it's no longer available, am guessing a rights issue), but Superconducter is very obviously a Prince guided project and his stamp is all over it. I haven't played it in a while but always like it when I do.

 

In fact if you go to Andy Allo's site you can stream it for free to 'try before you buy' SUPERCONDUCTOR

 

Thanks for the link, I'll give that a go! You mentioning Allo earlier reminded me that I've been meaning to check out some of her work. I've just been reading about Oui Can Love, and the cover choices are really interesting to me, a lot of songs i like. As you say, looks like it was available for less than a day and then put in the vault. I'll keep an eye on whether it gets another release sometime.

 

On the subject of album appearances, i love the collaboration Givin' Em What They Love on Janelle Monae's Electric Lady album from 2013. He sounds like he's enjoying himself on it and their voices fit together well. Love the "whoa-whoa daa-aaa-ance!" segment.

 

Mentioning Janelle Monae reminds me, and I don't like thinking this and maybe will change my mind with more exposure, but that re his last decade of work, other younger artists were making better "Prince music" than Prince was managing to. (Problem is, nearly every 21st cent Prince lp never made me WANT to give myself much more exposure....)

 

Art Official Age is underrated. Given the unusually long down time between albums, how disappointing 20Ten had been, and how hit-or-miss the one-offs had become, I was skeptical when Prince announced he was releasing two albums at once. (It was mildly interesting that Warner Bros. would be releasing them, but as Prince made clear, the label wasn't being run by any of the same people anymore.)

As mentioned, I hated the other one. But two glowing reviews - from Greg Kot in the Tribune and more surprisingly from Ben Greenman in The New Yorker ('A Legitimately Magical Prince Album') - piqued my curiosity, especially when others were kind of down on it.

Greenman didn't like the opening track ("a strange welter of E.D.M. clichés and Europop...a mess, provocative but not exactly successful"), but he wrote that "the rest of the album is easily Prince’s most coherent and satisfying record in more than a decade." Pretty strong endorsement.

I think the most common dismissal I heard was that it was Prince doing Janelle Monáe, and to an extent those critics are right - Prince saw how she used sci-fi concepts to explore the personal. Years later, when Dirty Computer came out, it was even suggested that the use of sci-fi concepts in the past served as a cover or a shield for Monáe, as if she was more comfortable exploring personal themes in that context because details would become more symbolic and less revealing. The same approach may have made Prince more comfortable exploring more personal themes as well, but the results are even more striking for how raw and exposed he sounds in some of the words. There is plenty of levity - as Greenman points out, the previously released "Breakfast Can Wait" was a lithe and light funk single that had a cover photo of Dave Chappelle as Prince. But on tracks like "Way Back Home" and the final affirmation, I think we got the clearest glimpse of how Prince really saw himself.

Here's what else Greenman wrote:

Songs like “Clouds” and “U Know,” slower and more repetitive than the kaleidoscopic funk-rock we’ve come to expect from Prince, suggested a new direction—a kind of gelatinous, futuristic R&B...These tracks worked in concert with the other singles to sketch out a theme: that technology separates us from those we’re close to, and even from ourselves; and that the lack of integration may well result in disintegration. “Clouds,” the second track on the album, which opens with the sound of a radio tuning, critiques the way the computer age offloads experiences to distant servers (that’s what the clouds are); the song instead prioritizes romance and human connection (“You should never underestimate the power of a kiss on the neck when she doesn’t expect a kiss on the neck”). It also folds in a well-constructed argument about the way the Internet era has encouraged empty exhibition and a half-baked argument about violence and bullying, before ending with a sci-fi monologue delivered by a British female voice that seems to suggest that Prince has been placed in some sort of centuries-long suspended animation...

None of this, though, is sufficient preparation for the homestretch of Art Official Age, which is where Prince stops worrying about the future or the past and truly inhabits the present. Beginning with “What It Feels Like,” a duet with the singer Andy Allo, Prince delivers a series of ballads, broken up by interludes and a red-meat dance song, that are like nothing he’s done before...

The closing songs are hard to absorb at first. “Way Back Home” sounds sluggish for a while and then, suddenly, it sounds revelatory. It’s a self-portrait painted in the strangest and most accurate colors imaginable, a melancholy confession and bruised boast in which Prince cops to the fact that he’s out of place, out of sorts, pushed forward at times by desperation but “born alive” in a world where most people are “born dead.” And “Time,” which runs for nearly seven minutes, is a love song, briefly lickerish, that’s mostly about the loneliness of the road. In both cases, Prince brings the tempo way down, focusses on the nuances of his melodies, shares the spotlight with female vocalists, weaves in motifs from earlier songs from the album, and adds a steady supply of surprising touches (such as the superbly funky, if subdued, horn outro to “Time”).

The ballads are broken up by “FunkNRoll,” a straightforwardly exciting party song that also appears on PlectrumElectrum, but the version here serves the album’s over-all message—it’s knotty, both playful and eerie, with sonar-like sound effects that create a sense of distance and mediation. The closing track, “Affirmation III,” is a haunting reprise of “Way Back Home.” And while it’s abstract (the clipped, angelic backing chorus, which seems to be on loan from Laurie Anderson, is even more prominent), it’s also concrete. For the first time in years, Prince seems not just carnal but corporeal. Way back on “Controversy,” he challenged categories: “Am I black or white? Am I straight or gay?” By the time of “I Would Die 4 U,” the challenge had turned to taunting: “I’m not a woman / I’m not a man / I am something you can never understand,” and then, messianically, “I’m not a human.” Here, he presents himself as something understandable and fully human. In “Breakfast Can Wait,” he pleads with his lover that she can’t “leave a black man in this state.” But that black man is in this state: he’s in his fifties, grappling with loneliness, aging, creative inspiration, self-doubt, a shifting cultural landscape, and love. As luck would have it, he’s also Prince.

It's not a towering masterpiece, but it's still fascinating, and a key album to the latter half of his career. A B+.

 

Yes, I quite liked her Blood album. And she will have a new, self-titled, album out next month, release date seems to be 17-07.

 

Great post, thanks for sharing.

 

Art Official Age is not a masterpiece but it's a great album, which had been a while. I love the whole album for it's atmosphere, but my favorite songs are (The) Breakdown and The Gold Standard

 

Something I have never really understood is why Prince seemed to have a fixation on releasing a triple album.

We know he originally wanted to release SOTT as a triple and then the first thing he did when leaving Warners was to release a triple album.

I would understand an artist deciding after recording a triple albums worth of grade A songs that they should release them all, but in Prince's case he seemed to have a need to release a triple album.

 

I always assumed that trimming down the triple album Crystal Ball in 1986/7 was so disappointing for Prince that it became the symbol for freedom.

 

Hit n Run Phase One (2015), NPG/Universal



Track listing:

1. Million $ Show
2. Shut This Down
3. Ain't About 2 Stop
4. Like a Mack
5. This Could B Us
6. Fallinlove2nite
7. X's Face
8. Hardrocklover
9. Mr. Nelson
10. 1000's of X's & O's
11. June

I don't really feel anything towards this album. The most notable detail for me was that Ain't About 2 Stop featured a guest appearance from Rita Ora, a Yugoslavian-born British singer who I like for reasons unrelated to her music.
Do you have any opinions on Phase One, unpopular or otherwise?
Would you recommend it with or without a caveat?

 

I know this is not a favourite among the fan base, but I really liked this record when it came out and I still like it now. It's Prince updated for the modern age, a Prince that could be played in clubs without sounding anachronistic. For me this record shows he was still active listening to music trends, still inventive, and still pushing himself forward right up until the end. It's his last party-banger album. Favourites include This Could Be US, Like a Mack, Shut This Down and June. Like a lot of post-millennium Prince albums, though, the mix suffers from being over-congested and I wish it was better mastered with more dynamics.

 

I love Prince too much to comment on this album . Let’s stick to all the joy he gave

 

The last two tracks "1000's of X's & O's" and "June" are keepers. They would've made a very fine one-off single. Otherwise a C- album.