Album Review: Michael Jackson Michael

Album cover for <i>Michael</i>. Photo / AP

Rating: 3.5/5
Verdict: King of Pop crown regains lustre, too late.

The thought that one shouldn't speak ill of the dead possibly came before the dead started releasing records. Some have managed more than they did when they were alive. It sounds like this is the first of a very long attic-clearing from the combined Jackson Estate and Sony Music.

That Michael Jackson has an album out just 18 months out after his death - and a year after the This Is It concert rehearsal movie - shows his absence, sad that it is, has sped up things down at the Jacko factory.

After all, in the past 15 years the King of Pop had only released two albums of original material (go on, try and name a hit off the last one). He wasn't one for deadlines in his latter years until of course he met his own.

But if it's all a bit of an undignified garage sale of an album, it's also rather good.

It's certainly more fun that 2001's Invincible. And if his vocals from demo recordings have been corrected by autotune, ironically the digital sheen acquired in places actually sounds like it belongs in the pop charts or the Glee chorus lines of 2010 - even if it has also acquired a weird warble on the edges of otherwise sweet-natured wedding-friendly ballads like The Way You Love Me and Best of Joy.

There are echoes of past Jackson eras especially in Hollywood Tonight, one of the best tracks on offer, which comes with the sort of stalking bassline and scratch-funk guitar that propelled Billie Jean; Breaking News might start out as yet another of Jackson's media-paranoia attacks set to music, but it winds up with something akin to his old exuberance - possibly care of a few old vocal tics sampled in, something you suspect has happened elsewhere too.

The Lenny Kravitz-assisted rock thump of (I Can't Make It) Another Day also shows him in good voice, even if the song is short of an Eddie Van Halen or Slash guitar solo to drive things into the red. And the Yellow Magic Orchestra sampling in Behind the Mask pulls off the trick of making a troubled man approaching his 50s sounding like the musical boy genius he was once.

There are lesser moments. Especially the first single. Hold My Hand has Akon in the biggest guest appearance of his long and illustrious career ... of guest appearances, while the song sounds like the copyright owners of Stand By Me might be getting in touch for theft of sentiment.

But among the album's other most notable ring-in, rapper 50 Cent certainly mounts a one-man zombie attack to Monster, the punchiest track on a 10-song album that is bookended by some predictably maudlin touches - the first line of the opening song is "this life don't last forever" and the closing track is entitled Much Too Soon.

But Michael starts off Jackson's further posthumous chapter of his recording career rather well. And as the old joke goes, it's no thriller, nor is it dangerous or off the wall. But it ain't bad either.

-TimeOut