Justin Timberlake
FutureSex/LoveSound
on Jive RecordsB+

Justin Timberlake wants to have sex with you. He doesn't want to make love-like when he sang, "You're a good girl and that's what makes me trust ya" four years ago-and he's not calling you the day after. On FutureSex/LoveSounds, his second solo outing, he's also freakier. "Baby, I'm your slave" is his new mantra. "I'll let you whip me if I misbehave."

Timberlake isn't, of course, the most decadent alumnus of The Mickey Mouse Club. But on FutureSex, he's accomplished a feat most peculiar: removing the sexy from sex. The disc plays like outr-disco coitus-a nod to the futuristic pop envisioned in the early 1980s by Prince, whose packaged perversity was articulated so coldly it had to be taken at face value. Unlike Prince, Timberlake is no auteur, but his brand of pop remains as smart as it was on his delightful 2002 debut, Justified.

The Prince comparison is as obvious as the Michael Jackson one was four years ago. With producer Timbaland behind the knobs, FutureSex is, for a multi-platinum-album-to-be, fairly adventurous, though never visionary. The disc's first single, "Sexyback," is perfectly minimalist: all dirty and pulsing and robotic. Here, Timberlake hides his falsetto behind a veil of distortion. For him, it's an anonymous tryst, sweaty but never visceral.

The other singles are even bigger highlights of the album. "What Goes Around./.Comes Around Interlude" is an ostensible sequel to the Britney-dis "Cry Me a River," and on FutureSex, the song most indebted to Justified. At a sprawling seven-and-a-half minutes, it's an impassioned, multi-part epic: Far from feeling jilted, Timberlake's lament for a love unrequited is at first characterized by self-doubt. By the song's operatic-and nearly Wagnerian-coda, he's unforgiving but not avenging. "Girl, you got what you deserved," he sings. "What goes around comes around."

A bare, glitchy beat rides shotgun to an off-kilter, ethereal synthline in "My Love," a duet with the rapper T.I. and perhaps the finest track on FutureSex. The track blends the album's prevailing detachment with a far more curious purpose: "My Love" is a marriage proposal.

Unfortunately, few songs on FutureSex's second side match such heights. Often, it's a simple matter of sheen over substance-of novel production trumping lackluster songwriting. This is particularly unfortunate: Many of the tracks segue into each other, an indication that Timberlake hoped to craft a cohesive work in an industry more comfortable with a handful of singles padded by filler. In that respect, FutureSex barely signals a maturation from Timberlake's boy-band days, as critic-friendly as the album is. Still, there's enough good here to compensate: He's neither our generation's Michael Jackson nor its Prince, but he's the worthiest successor we've got.

-Jonathan Fischer




John Mayer
Continuum
on Columbia Records

A-

Somewhere in John Mayer's mind-next to memories of the late Stevie Ray Vaughan, the sounds of Muddy Waters and classic Marvin Gaye records-must lie a plan to take over and ultimately transform music as we know it. The next step: Mayer's latest record, Continuum, and third major-label release. Gone is the singer/songwriter's characteristic acoustic-pop sound, replaced here by a smooth mix of Motown-style soul, Chicago blues and Mayer's gifted vocals. Mayer has moved far beyond his bubble-gum past (think 2002's "Your Body is a Wonderland") and into his rightful place as a soulful leader of modern blues.

Continuum's first single and opening track, "Waiting on the World to Change," has gained both critical and commercial acclaim. The track has spent a respectable eight weeks and counting on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles chart, peaking at number 21. The song, which borrows its melody from Curtis Mayfield's "We're A Winner," features a soft funk beat overlaid with Mayer's raspy vocals, which lament political apathy and a helpless society. The song's chorus swells into a call-and-response hook that alternates between an unaccompanied Mayer and a choir of his own vocals. The track glides into a bouncing instrumental break before allowing Mayer to display his remarkable guitar prowess in a brief but powerful solo.

On "Belief," perhaps the record's next single, Mayer seems to answer the questions posed by "Waiting on the World to Change" as he sings "We're never gonna win the world/We're never gonna stop the war/We're never gonna beat this if belief is what we're fighting for."

On "Vultures"-a track previously released live by the John Mayer Trio-the 28-year-old singer channels the spirit of Marvin Gaye as he transforms his typically warm, bassy vocals into a rich falsetto.

Mayer's uniquely bluesy guitar style is truly realized on the album's ninth track, "Bold as Love," a Jimi Hendrix cover that Mayer nails in every possible way. The track's screaming guitar solo-which drops briefly into a whisper-is enough to satisfy even the purest of blues aficionados.

On Continuum, John Mayer continues to answer critics who once pegged him as a one-trick pony with an acoustic guitar. Little did they know that the clean-cut singer from Connecticut and one-time Berklee College of Music dropout would mature into the next Stevie Ray Vaughan-not coincidentally, Mayer's lifelong hero, whose initials the singer had tattooed onto his body.

-Jonathan Lowe




The Rapture
Pieces of the People We Love
on Mercury Records

B

"People don't dance no more / They just stand there like this / They cross their arms / And stare you down / And drink and moan and dis."

So sings Matt Safer on "Whoo! Alright Yeah.Uh Huh"-yes, the song's title is a verbatim transcript of its chorus-the centerpiece of The Rapture's Pieces of the People We Love. But if kids just aren't dancing in 2006, why are these once-celebrated but more-often-maligned Brooklynites still pumping dirty bass grooves like it's 2003-or better yet, 1979? Is their sophomore album a daring last stand or a lament? A stab at cashing in on movement long co-opted by A&R execs, or an elegy for a scene that grew, far too quickly, into a fad?

Their 2003 debut, Echoes, was a revelation-inconsistent, to be sure, but daring despite its indebtedness to post-punk's club greats, Public Image Ltd. and Gang of Four. Echoes had its clunkers, but the best songs-"House of Jealous Lovers," "Killing," "Sister Savior"-were rickety, apocalyptic blends of disco and punk rock, always histrionic and never strutting. Interpol had opened the post-punk floodgates the year before, but The Rapture eschewed polish-and the genre's notorious angularities-for a far less precocious sound, even though many fans credited it to the eccentric production team The DFA.

Three years later, The Rapture is sounding more cohesive. Nothing falls flat on Pieces; it's the overall product that leaves a sour taste. "Whoo! Alright" is the obvious successor to "House of Jealous Lovers": It's spastic and shimmying and manic, adorned by a stinging cowbell and electronic squeaks. Produced by flavor-of-the-year Danger Mouse, the song is much busier than anything on Echoes, and here, as on the single "Get Myself Into It," it's proficient but not comfortable. It sounds like The Rapture-not as the band was, or how you might expect it to evolve, but like some hazy recollection of how the dance-punk aesthetic that it made fashionable should sound. The difference between Pieces and imitators like Radio 4 is a rawer talent: Simply put, The Rapture is very good at what it does. Only now, the band has become cripplingly complacent.

-Jonathan Fischer