Prince

NPG/Tidal

A new Prince album – again! –  means headlines, particularly as this one follows swiftly after the last pair and in a gimmick-move it’s available exclusively on the Tidal streaming platform (at least  for a couple more days and then it’ll be a CD since people concerned with owning every Prince album are – invariably – CD-buyers/collectors).

A new Prince album means hyperbole – platitudinous proclamations of best ever and return to form, well why not…people will just compare it to his glory days, or point out how far off he is, right?

So, here goes:

This is, once again a long way off Sign O’ The Times and Purple Rain and the albums that arrived in-between and before them. It is, in part, close to Graffiti Bridge and more often the perplexingly rubbish Chaos and Disorder.

But this is less about chaos, more about disorder – Prince grabbing desperately for some EDM-type themes and flourishes and some pop-stars du jour (ones he can help push on Tidal, through Tidal natch – namely Rita Ora and Judith Hill).

But like Chaos and Bridge and every single Prince album there is at least one good song. The problem though is you have to sit through so much shit to get to it. Worse than that actually – for it’s going to be easy to forget this album, to never bother again (or don’t bother in the first place – if I were you) – it’s the bits on this album (a slow-jam that circles near the Sign ballads, but can’t land) and pieces (some getting close to the pleasant but weaker tracks on Musicology) that bug. The laughing stock middle of the album is easy to dismiss. Just as it should be easy to dismiss any positive review of this album as some kind of paid-for puff-piece. (There could be no other explanation). But it’s when you hear a shock of electric bass (Shut This Down) or a funk breakdown, some fine ensemble playing (Like A Mack) or even a bit of the ole Prince proto-rap delivery (when it works) that are the sore points.

They’re the problem pieces, the sore thumbs of the album – they stick out because they seem to have arrived, this time, by fluke. In one of the laziest, most overtly phoned-in releases of his career (which is saying something, which is saying everything) he rushes out a weird, desperate bid for relevancy. And because of his past genius there are a small handful of fleeing moments where you are given false hope. It’s a bit like bumping into the ex and then remembering one or two good times shortly after. Except it’s not even that good. And a whole lot more heart-breaking.

And the idea that this is only “Phase One”? No. That’s too much to take. This is a streaming pile of shit.

R.I.P. Prince’s Recorded Music Career.