N*E*R*D - Seeing Sounds

by Eddie Robson

Realising their vision

"Whereas this side-project began as an outlet for The Neptunes to front their own material, then solidified into a funk-rock group, it seems to have drifted back into a cross-genre arena where they can do whatever they want."

When you’ve been as thoroughly ubiquitous in pop music as The Neptunes were at one point, you’ve given yourself a hell of a hard act to follow. Not only were they producing practically everything, the people they weren’t producing were copying them. They may still come up with amazing productions, but they’ll never get back where they were. The lukewarm reaction to Madonna’s ‘Hard Candy’ album, which amounted to disappointment that, by hiring The Neptunes and Timbaland, she seemed content to merely sound like everyone else, is an illustration of this: if they were still cutting-edge, it wouldn’t have mattered.

So, bearing in mind that Pharrell Williams’ solo debut didn’t exactly set the world alight either (no surprise, after it led off with the half-arsed ‘Can I Have It Like That’ single), what are they going to do now? Returning to N*E*R*D for the first time in four years isn’t a bad idea. Yet whereas this side-project began as an outlet for them to front their own material, then solidified into a funk-rock group, it seems to have drifted back into a cross-genre arena where they can do whatever they want. This may be a problem for some, particularly the relentlessly pigeon-holed American market (the point of Billboard having separate charts for ‘Modern’ rock and ‘Mainstream’ rock escapes me), but it seems to have worked well for N*E*R*D themselves.

After a spoken-word intro overlaid with some 1950s easy-listening strings, the album kicks off with the straight-ahead N*E*R*D of ‘Time For Some Action’, but first single ‘Everyone Nose’ sees Williams constructing a dazzling drum line that’s more reminiscent of his production work and throwing in snippets of free-jazz horns. ‘Windows’ has an angular guitar figure which recalls Devo, whilst ‘Sooner or Later’ is an epic ballad with a Beatlesesque melody; both tracks also bear the influence of Prince. It’s all recognisably Neptunes, but fresh-sounding enough to keep you from feeling like you’ve heard it before.

It might have been better for the album to have followed the pure pop rule that says you don’t put more than ten tracks on your record unless the extras are absolute blinders. It could even have been nine tracks a la ‘Thriller’, actually: ‘Happy’ and ‘Love Bomb’ are fairly surplus to requirements. It’s by no means a complete reinvention, but this record sees its makers trying to think differently – which is what they got famous doing in the first place.

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