The Daily Spin, July 5
Justin Timberlake | FutureSex/LoveSounds
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
If you want to suggest an album, good news! You can do so right here!
Album: FutureSex/LoveSounds (2006)
Artist: Justin Timberlake
Link:
It would be a crime for me to review this album and not speak to its place as a formative album for what I look for in music. This came out when I was 9, old enough to remember it well from rides in the backseat of my mom’s Ford Expedition, young enough to not really recall much before it in terms of sound that I liked - and reader, when I tell you I was hooked.
At this point in time, I didn’t really care to know much more than that this was Justin Timberlake, but now I look back and see Timbaland’s stellar production, lightyears ahead of his contemporaries in so many ways, using percussion and strings in ways that it feels like it took the rest of the field literal years to catch up to, hooks that drew you in like a pro angler paired with oft-sublime vocals from Justin Timberlake, rising from his career as a member of NSYNC to a stellar follow-up to 2002’s Justified.
It’s impossible to not note Timbaland’s work, because so much of what makes this album work is his production, but it’d also be insanity to not highlight Timberlake here - and more importantly, what made this duo so viciously talented - by taking away a lot of the feel-good happy pop and replacing it with a more somber, more serious tone, but keeping those forward-funk and disco elements, the towering strings and grinding guitars, it creates a beautiful symphony (sometimes literally), the sort of sound that surrounds your ears in every sense.
The album feels deeply 2000s, never more clearly than with ‘LoveStoned’, a track that flips with surprising ease between catchy disco and gritty string-guitar arrangements, all done with the deft fingers of someone who knows exactly when to flip a song on its head to maximize the punch of it. It’s one of the few albums that takes six or seven-minute songs and makes them feel half that long, using instrumental interludes and arrangements to their highest potential. Even songs that in some ways make me cringe - ‘Losing My Way’, hello, old friend - have their moments of shining, the sort of sound that is tinged with memory in such a way that is impossible to recreate, something entirely of itself. It shaped my taste in such a way that it still, even now, defines what I look for in music, and that has to be worth something.
Rating: 9.2/10
Best Tracks: What Goes Around…/…Comes Around; LoveStoned / I Think She Knows; SexyBack
Worst Tracks: Until the End of Time