XSCAPE
is a collection of discarded Michael Jackson tracks that never made the cut. There’s
an immediate moral dilemma with an album like this. Would Michael really have
wanted these tracks to be sieved out of the wastebin and served to the public?
Isn’t there a reason why unreleased tracks go unreleased?
Most
likely, this is not a caring final tribute to the King of Pop, but yet another
chance for record companies, producers and other musical parasites to make
money off his corpse. With this in mind, it’s easy to go into XSCAPE eagerly expecting
to hate it. That’s kind of what I did.
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| Unless MJ comes back from the grave, we'll never know whether or not he'd be happy with this release (HANG ON A MOMENT! MICHAEL JACKSON? DEAD??? WHY WASN'T IT IN THE NEWS?????? #jk) |
On the
surface, it’s easy to see why some of the material on this record wasn’t deemed
fit for public consumption. Given MJ’s past, a track entitled ‘Do you know
where your children are’ might not have gone down all too well were it released
whilst he was alive. The track ‘A Place with no Name’ meanwhile – a bizarre mutated
version of America’s ‘A Horse with No Name’ with equally poor lyrics – simply lacks
the novelty that we associate with MJ.
Saying
that, I did enjoy this album overall and whilst some tracks don’t quite hit the
mark, others remind me of just how bloody fantastic a vocal performer Michael
was and what a shame it is that he’s no longer with us. Alternating between his
soft whimper and snappy shouted delivery, each track showcases the fact that
Michael never held back, that he put every bit of his heart and vocal ability
into each song, even the ones that were never meant to be released.
Beefed
up with 2014 production and 808 trap drums, the album does feel current
although at times, to quote Richard Suchet from Sky news, the tracks do ‘sound
like modern day remixes’ rather than actual MJ songs. Original versions of each
track can be found on the deluxe version of this record, some of which sound
instrumentally better, others of which sound instrumentally worse. In both
cases, ‘Loving You’ succeeds at wowing. Take or leave ‘Slave to the Rhythm’ –
it sounds like Enrique Iglesias wrote it, the modern version sporting k-pop
synths, the original simply bland.
TRACK TASTER: