We Are<\/i><\/a> was a triumphant m\u00e9lange of New Orleans jazz, soul, funk, gospel, hip-hop and piano-led pop, full of guest shots that further elevated Batiste\u2019s game, in support of a set of songs that felt like a celebration of both life and music itself. It was fun, smart, insightful, danceable and emotional\u2026 at times, even magical. <\/p>\nCompared head-to-head with that confident, rangy triumph, World Music Radio<\/i> comes off as an overcooked, steaming-hot mess.<\/p>\n
The album kicks off with a theater-of-the-mind sketch introducing its host, a character named Billy Bob Bo-Bob (no, seriously) who has something to do with the album\u2019s loose, muddy aliens-exploring-world-music concept, though I couldn\u2019t tell you what. From there you get a series of songs interspersed with seemingly random interludes and atmospherics that still fail to distract from the album\u2019s fatal flaw: Batiste has taken the two most grating, obnoxious elements of modern pop music production\u2014programmed beats and distorting vocal filters\u2014and built an entire album around them. <\/p>\n
The crime here is that each of the songs on World Music Radio<\/i> held the potential to be developed into something great; instead, most have been drowned in a bathtub of electronic gimmickry. \u201cRaindance\u201d pairs soul-funk bass with programmed synths and processed vocals; there\u2019s a fun, celebratory song smothered under all the production gloss. \u201cBe Who You Are\u201d takes an enchanting calypso cadence and buries it under cascading waves of synth noise and tweaked-out vocals. \u201cWorship\u201d mixes gospel, rap, and electro-soul flavors in one shapeshifting track that ends up feeling overproduced and scattershot. \u201cMy Heart\u201d melds New Orleans nightclub jazz with Spanish melodrama, an intriguing pairing that\u2019s over almost before it begins. And then there\u2019s \u201cDrink Water,\u201d a disjointed electro-soul number that features more of guests Jon Bellion and Fireboy DML than of Batiste, with all three voices processed until they barely sound human.<\/p>\n
The brief, hooky \u201cCalling Your Name\u201d offers pleasant bounce and passionate vocals, but the vocal filters and electronic nonsense are endlessly irritating. Why would you do this to your music? When, after another head-scratching interlude, \u201cButterfly\u201d arrives with just Batiste on piano and unfiltered vocals, it\u2019s like a cleansing breath to wash off all that accumulated electro-goop, a gentle number offering sweet praise for a lover.<\/p>\n
Social consciousness shows up on \u201cUneasy\u201d as Batiste falsettos about the socio-political climate, with synths and programming overwhelming the song lurking inside; when he eventually brings in acoustic piano, the instrument sounds like it\u2019s from an entirely different sonic universe from the rest of the song. \u201cCall Now (504.305.8269)\u201d delivers another overcooked electro-soul number, leading into another non sequitur of an interlude, followed by \u201cBoom For Real,\u201d a tricked-out, funked-up little jam with heavily processed vocals.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re all the way to track 15\u2014\u201cMovement 18\u2019 (Heroes)\u201d\u2014before we get to an experiment that actually works, as Batiste riffs on piano under a series of spoken-word voiceovers by Wayne Shorter, Duke Ellington, Quincy Jones and Alvin Batiste, delving into theology, philosophy, psychology and more. Naturally, the next track is an out-of-left-field White Album<\/i> shuffle, the friendly-yet-somehow-also-menacing \u201cMaster Power.\u201d Gospel-tinged \u201cRunning Away\u201d is a gentle, piano-centric song of devotion that builds to a satisfying crescendo while succumbing to fewer production flourishes than many other tracks here.<\/p>\n
If only that had been true for \u201cWhite Space,\u201d where Batiste\u2019s beautiful piano playing\u2014a repetitive, rhythmic riff that feels almost hymn-like\u2014is marred by the decision to put his vocals through a filter that makes them sound like they were generated by AI. It\u2019s like putting Groucho glasses on The David<\/i>; you could, but why would you?<\/p>\n
And then you get to the album\u2019s nominal closer, \u201cWherever You Are\u201d; on my first time through World Music Radio<\/i>, it was the only song I liked without reservation or qualification, a big, bluesy gospel ballad with splashy drums, no vocal filters, and Persian musician Mehrnam Rastegari playing the otherworldly Kamancheh over the final crescendos. The album\u2019s \u201cbonus\u201d track \u201cLife Lesson\u201d seems to be labeled as that mostly because its production style is noticeably different from the rest of the album; it\u2019s a long, sweet, spare love ballad with Batiste and guest Lana Del Rey dueting over his piano, without a vocal filter or electronic texture in sight.<\/p>\n
World Music Radio<\/i> is an album that appears to revel in its own disjointedness, aspiring to a sort of free-form, boundary-less celebration of creativity\u2014which might have felt good to the artist, but only rarely delivers anything resembling what this audience member was hoping for. <\/p>\n
Having said that, this album does have its moments. \u201cButterfly\u201d is a fluttering flash of beauty, \u201cMovement 18\u2019 (Heroes)\u201d a fascinating construction, \u201cMaster Power\u201d a punchy distraction, and \u201cWherever You Are\u201d a rewarding cross-genre excursion. Finally, \u201dLife Lesson\u201d is gorgeous in its simplicity. If only that simplicity and directness had bled into the rest of this album, which features a dozen or more guest vocalists, almost every one burdened with filters and auto-tuning that leave you to wonder what their voices actually sound like.<\/p>\n
The kitchen-sink approach to arrangement and production taken on World Music Radio<\/i> obscures the heart of Jon Batiste\u2019s music, and that\u2019s a shame, because the most appealing thing about both the man and his music is his heart. Once the dust settles from this album I hope Batiste can regroup, rein in the gimmicky production, and focus on what got him this far: his humanity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":35074,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[10669],"rating":[11204],"class_list":["post-46951","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-jon-batiste","rating-rating-c-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46951\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46951"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}