This deserves a thread, to be quite honest.
Listen to it on Janelle Monae's Myspace.
(And buy it!)
Release: May 18th (US) July 12th (UK)
Tracklist:
And the press hyperbole (Wiki):
Listen to it on Janelle Monae's Myspace.
(And buy it!)
Release: May 18th (US) July 12th (UK)
Tracklist:
1. "Suite II Overture" 2:31
2. "Dance or Die" featuring Saul Williams 3:12
3. "Faster" 3:19
4. "Locked Inside" 4:16
5. "Sir Greendown" 2:14
6. "Cold War" 3:23
7. "Tightrope" featuring Big Boi 4:22
8. "Neon Gumbo" 1:37
9. "Oh, Maker" 3:46
10. "Come Alive (The War of the Roses)" 3:22
11. "Mushrooms & Roses" 5:42
12. "Suite III Overture" 1:41
13. "Neon Valley Street" 4:11
14. "Make The Bus" featuring of Montreal 3:19
15. "Wondaland" 3:36
16. "57821" featuring Deep Cotton 3:16
17. "Say Youll Go" 6:01
18. "BabopbyeYa" 8:47
And the press hyperbole (Wiki):
Pitchfork Media writer Matthew Perpetua praised The ArchAndroid's musical ambition and called it "about as bold as mainstream music gets, marrying the world-building possibilities of the concept album to the big tent genre-mutating pop of Michael Jackson and Prince in their prime". He commended the album for "style hopping" without "compromising quality or cohesion" and cited André 3000's The Love Below (2003) as "its most recent antecedent"
Comparing it to singer Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814 (1989), Mock described The ArchAndroid as "a smothered funk, though perhaps at times too thick, too inaccessible, but not so much I didn't want to shake my ass" and viewed it as musically progressive, stating "Monáe has given pop music its first Toni Morrison moment, where fantasy, funk, and the ancestors come together for an experience that evolves one's soul... You really don't know whether you want to diagram it, dance to it, or just be dumbstruck. It owes as much to Parliament-Funkadelic as it does to Samuel Delaney and Octavia Butler. She is finally doing what a number of artistsparticularly black artistshave not been able to do in years, and that's move pop music forward".