Last week a number of journalists received an email inviting them to a playback for a mysterious new album. The only information included was the location – a ridiculously swanky hotel in Knightsbridge – the time (6pm) and the words "The Best You've Never Heard". That was it. Writers then had to ring the PR to find out who it was, with no confirmation taking place via email in case someone decided to hack in and leak it all on Twitter. Which, unfortunately, is sort of what happened, when Epic – Jackson's label – decided to announce news of a new Jackson album early, with dribs and drabs of information starting to emerge on Twitter, before a full press release was sent out yesterday lunchtime. Hardly pushing a massive barge down a river, but what can you do in straitened times?
So what do we know? We know the album is called Xscape, named after a Rodney Jerkins-produced song recorded during the sessions for Jackson's last proper album, Invincible, and now reworked by Jerkins for the new album. We know the lead producer on the album, brought in by Epic Records CEO LA Reid to "contemporise" songs from Jackson's vast song archive, is Timbaland and that other producers involved include Stargate, Jerome "J-Roc" Harmon and John McClain.
What we still can't tell you are any of the song titles, with the journalists gathered in the hotel's white 80s sci-fi nightclub nightmare of a function room told the song titles won't be shared and can't be mentioned because they're still being finalised (if I could hazard a guess I'd say they're keeping the song titles back because a lot of the songs have leaked already and it's not as exciting to hear the words "eight new Michael Jackson songs" if you can easily find demos for them online). All phones have to be handed in on the door, while this poor frontline journalist had to fight it out with two security guards to be able to carry in a bag containing a laptop I didn't really want dumped at the back of a cupboard (in the end I had to take the laptop out of the bag to show that it wasn't rigged with some sort of special recording device.)
Once inside the chatting throng are greeted by pictures of Jackson on the wall, as well as the "teaser" poster that was included in the invitation, alongside one that reads "Hearing Is Believing" (apparently these posters have already started appearing around London to help generate intrigue). After opening the whole event somewhat crassly with an advert for a new Sony mobile phone – which will be pre-loaded with the album – the MD of Sony UK tells us that in order to show off the mobile phone's excellent sound quality the album will be played through a phone over the speakers. Given that we've all just had our own phones taken off us, everyone assumes he's joking, but he's not; the first ever play anywhere in the world of a Timbaland-curated Michael Jackson album takes place through a mobile phone. Unfortunately it sounds like it as well – with nearly all of the songs lost amidst reverberating bass and too-high drum claps.
Despite the failing sound there's enough on show to categorically say, without question, that Xscape is leagues ahead of Michael, an album marred not only by the appearance of Akon but by accusations that some of the songs featured a Michael Jackson impersonator. Opening with a burst of disco-tinged soul, it's an album that seems to focus on songs from pre-90s Jackson, with the first song a light and airy take on the effortless Off the Wall era. With a youthful-sounding Jackson skipping in-between expensive-sounding production, it's reminiscent, somewhat ironically, of Justin Timberlake, especially his The 20/20 Experience double album. In fact, a lot of the Timbaland productions slip neatly into either Timberlake's FutureSex/LoveSounds-era – all squelchy beats, big drum claps and lashings of synth strings – or the more opulent sound of The 20/20 Experience. The second song – possibly called Chicago and cited by Timbaland as a future single – falls into the former camp, with Jackson utilising a harder vocal delivery that's encased in a big industrial melange of jackhammer beats.
While the album's stated purpose of making Jackson sound contemporary is followed to the letter, there are times when the production overwhelms songs that are perhaps not sturdy enough to support the added superstructure. The third song played is another Off the Wallesque, mid-paced love song with a youthful, almost naive-sounding vocal. It feels very much like a song that didn't make it on to an old album, and while the production is good – there's an amazing rolling beat throughout – it still feels slight. And when one of the songs directly recalls the bassline from The Way You Make Me Feel it seems like a step too far; a reminder again that these were songs that Jackson, ever the perfectionist, didn't finish for good reason.
Thankfully five songs in there's a proper, undeniably amazing hit in the shape of what may or may not finally be called Do You Know Where Your Children Are (the original incarnation of the song leaked in 2012). Opening with a delicate flurry of cascading 80s synths, it feels like the perfect embodiment of the old and the new, with some vintage “hee hee” ad-libs peppering the sophisticated mesh of electronics. It also features a typical Jackson pre-chorus section that then opens out into the album's best chorus, before a great false stop moment heralds an even more bonkers final third, with Jackson hee-heeing and ow-ing his head off.
The sixth song, Slave to the Rhythm, first appeared last summer, when a high quality version leaked as a duet with Justin Bieber (and again in snippet form on a mobile phone advert). Thankfully, Bieber is missing from the final version, which Timbaland has used to show off all his production touches – lashings of beatboxing in the intro, loads of vocal tics throughout, big spidery bassline and, as with some of his other songs on Xscape, barely any space for the song to breathe. Thankfully Slave to the Rhythm – thought to have been recorded initially for Dangerous in 1991 and then left off Invincible at the last minute – is strong enough to fight its way through the clutter. From there we get perhaps the album's only true lowpoint in a number that feels like about three different songs fighting for attention, before finishing with Jerkins' Xscape, the only song that sounds like a bit of a struggle vocally, with Jackson's various vocal tics becoming a bit of a hindrance rather than something more carefree. It also feeds on the paranoia Jackson brought into his music after the child abuse allegations of the mid-90s with lines like “I won't hide away” and “I can't do what I want to do” snarled rather than sung. But again, the production is sprightly, with synth strings and horn samples popping up unannounced and a bit towards the end where the various layers fall away to leave some brilliant ad-libs and the final word, “escape”.
Xscape feels like an album created to showcase a handful of Jackson songs that on the whole deserve to be heard. You get the immediate sense that a lot of time (and money) has been spent on these songs and that care's been taken to show the songs off in the best light possible. While some of them are very obviously album tracks at best, there are flashes of genius that haven't been diluted or watered down. In fact, Xscape manages to bring most of them to life.
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