Prince - HITnRUN Phase One (2015)

Prince's new effort, exclusive to Jay Z's Tidal service (for now), is billed as being an "experimental" effort. But the reality is something far less earth-shaking: a casual, slightly-weirder-than-usual release with one very good R&B song (that's reportedly been kicking around in his vault for a while), stranded in the album's penultimate slot.

Prince's hype-man instincts defy categorization every bit as much as his vocal and instrumental talents beggar description. Though he's fallen off since the 1980s—who, in his shoes, wouldn't?—it's this artist's strange and frequent urge to over-promise that helps keep everyone harping on Sign 'O' the Times as his apogee. Yet here we are again. An album title like HITNRUN Phase One promises a fair amount, not least the possibility of a concept worth serializing. And that's before the album is announced by its creators as being "experimental" in construction. Though after stripping away the promotional language from this streaming-only platter, exclusive to Jay Z's Tidal service (for now), one finds something far less earth-shaking: a casual, slightly-weirder-than-usual release with one very good R&B song (that's reportedly been kicking around in his vault for a while), stranded in the album's penultimate slot.

To get to that very good song—at least in the manner that Prince and his young co-composer, producer, and mixer Joshua Welton intend—you'll plug through a half-hour sequence that contains a throwaway intro, a trio of putative party-starters cluttered with the confetti of modern-dancefloor production-debris, two reworked (as opposed to improved) songs from 2014's superior Art Official Age, and a tweaked version of the "Fallinlove2nite" standalone single that failed to make that prior album. (Ditching Zooey Deschanel's backing vocals doesn't much elevate that breezy tune's mild charm.)

Among the remains, "Hardrocklover" would seem to be an opportunity for one of pop's most reliably sensuous guitarists to make up ground. But the song seems strangely subdued and bored with itself. While the lyrics ("Turn my guitar up so I can make this woman scream") suggest that the inevitable appearance of guitar-heroism will be climactic, Prince's unfurling of his distorto-wail cape feels rote. The loopy-but-hard-hitting funk of "X's Face" is initially promising, though it too is thin on development. Elsewhere, the (mostly) instrumental "Mr. Nelson" riffs with a modicum of inspiration on remnants from Art Official Age standout "Clouds".