One of the most prolific musicians

A lot doesn’t necessarily mean good. When you release one album a year since 1978 without any gaps at all the music finally becomes unimpressive if you like it or not. But what should Prince do with his amazingly prolific musicianship? He cannot ignore the urges of inspiration or through newly penned songs into the dustbin. He still has some things to say in contrast to Michael Jackson, who has turned into a parody on himself long, long time ago. And while Madonna writes books for children and speaks about cabbala he keeps writing music. Nowadays mass media rarely discuss Prince’s attempts and his albums receive airplay rotation even more seldom so this is probably why he made up his mind to an unprecedented move and began distributing his new album Planet Earth through the British newspaper The Mail On Sunday as a free cover mount. It surely wasn’t supposed to mean that Prince experiences hard times and withers without attention from the audience. Quite on the contrary, his two recent albums became the best selling records of Prince in the last 10 years. This move rather proves his enormous creative fruitfulness all the more Planet Earth is far from being a filler album. It can hardly compete with Purple Rain, of course, but generally the album sounds worthy of prince of pop music.

Prince mixes pop, rock and funk

The good point about Planet Earth is that it cannot make you bored. The album is very streamlined and unobtrusive. Prince makes nice and coherent pop compositions and mixes them with elements of rock and funk. Don’t expect that the album entirely consists of Prince’s signature funky hits – Planet Earth is more pop oriented than some of his previous works, but you may count on a set of good songs in which you’ll definitely recognize hand of Prince. Overall the album offers two types of songs: upbeat funky pop and weird R&B ballads that sound pretty shapeless. Both of these sides can boast with their highlights. Such tracks as Guitar and Chelsea Rodgers are the best representatives of not only the record’s funky side but of the entire album. The songs sound powerful, energetic and simply great. Actually, The One U Wanna C can be also referred to them. As for the aforementioned ballads, the best representatives here are Mr. Goodnight and Future Baby Mama. Somewhere Here On Earth heads this list as the smoothest song of the album.

The album’s material is easy to get along with

Planet Earth has a pretty unusual sound that has noticeably influenced the general mood of the album. The first descriptive term that comes to mind is a word massive. All the instruments sound very deep and strive to occupy the entire sonic space thus making this record very loud and restless. It adds good points to the up-tempo songs but seems to be senseless for ballads. The album is good for parties but it will hardly suite as the background music for your spare hours after work even despite half of the album consists of slow and supposedly relaxing songs. However the material itself is really easy to get along with. It is positive and extremely friendly so this peculiar mixture of different moods creates a pretty unusual effect. Overall Planet Earth is a good album by the standards of Prince, it has a few really good songs like Guitar, which is probably one of his best songs for the last decade and if there are any drawbacks they are few in number and doesn’t stick out too much. Planet Earth is not the best album in the entire Prince’s discography but it keeps doing the same thing that his two recent albums started doing. The album brings back Prince’s popularity and fame, which he has gradually lost in 90’s.

31.07.2007