'There Goes My Baby' shows that slow jams can be catchy as well as steamy, while 'Foolin' Around' recalls his hugely successful Confessions cut 'Burn'.
Raymond does contain evidence that Usher can still crack out a decent tune if he wants to. Sadly, the remaining tracks about sex, troubled relationships and, er, more sex, are so lacking in variety that the album can't help feeling one-dimensional and bland.įortunately, Raymond Vs. The album's 15-strong production task, which includes hitmakers Jam & Lewis (Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson), Danja (Britney Spears, Madonna) and Sean Garrett (Beyoncé, Chris Brown), keep things moving at a strictly bump n' grind pace throughout, briefly chaning gear for recent chart-topper 'OMG', a will.i.am-helmed club banger which sticks out like a diamond in the rough. "Tonight we gonna do a lot of sexin'", the 31-year-old father-of-two promises on 'Hey Daddy (Daddy's Home)', while 'So Many Girls' finds him professing to be a hit with the ladies on an international scale: "Asian, Caucasian, Bajan, Jamaican - I got a million." On tracks like these – especially 'Guilty', on which he admits to "leaving and having a little fun" - it's hard to sympathise with the man who seemingly couldn't sign "them papers" fast enough. US buzz single and album track 'Papers' addresses the sore topic most explicitly, with Usher proclaiming: "I'm ready to sign them papers." In fact, the singer lays out the reasons for the end of his marriage - "I know it's you I love / But then I also know it's you I don't like" - almost as if it were a piece of raw meat, filleted and splayed across the butcher's block and left for the gossip rags to pick clean.įor much of the record, Usher seems keen to retract Stand's pro-monogamy message and trade it back for the sex-frenzied midtempo R&B of yore. Raymond finds Usher, somewhat inevitably, drawing on the breakdown of his marriage. However, less than two years later, the singer has dramatically shifted the subject matter for his latest offering, the rather ominously-titled Raymond vs. With three smash singles at Urban radio, There Goes My Baby, Lil’ Freak and Hey Daddy (Daddy’s Home), the LaFace/JLG R&B star’s Raymond v Raymond album will debut at 1 on next week’s HITS sales chart, sporting a total now pegged at 330-350k, which may even climb higher on anticipation of a busy Easter weekend at retail. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.The last Usher album, 2008's Here I Stand, heralded the R&B star's growth from a libido-raging twenty-something to A Grown Man indulging in what he termed "the true makings of love" with then-wife Tameka Foster. PliesĪudio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. It just doesn’t sound like the catchy Usher that I was used to hearing in the early 00’s. US buzz single and album track Papers addresses. I have included three songs that will be on the next album, but if they are respresentative of the standard on the rest of the album then i’m glad it has been pushed back, there is definitely more work to do. Raymond finds Usher, somewhat inevitably, drawing on the breakdown of his marriage. Luckily for him, he seems to have the powerhouses of production in his corner for this album, they include: Jermaine Dupri, Ne-Yo, The Neptunes, Polow da Don, RedOne, Dre & Vidal, Danja, The Runners, Tricky Stewart, Jazze Pha and T-Pain.
If he doesn’t there is a chance that he could fade away into mediocrity. He will need to register more first week sales than his last album so that he can maintain his status as a major force in the music industry. I think this album is critcal to his future success. This must have come as a shock to Usher as prior to that his career was only going upwards. So seems the case for Usher Raymond IV as well, who releases Raymond v.Raymond as his sixth full-length album and the follow up to 2008’s Here I Stand.Yet, in concept, his latest album seems to be more of a follow-up to the double-platinum Confessions, in which Usher profiled the. Confessions shipped over 1.1m copies in the first week of its release compared with only (haha) 433k copies of Here I Stand. A rather gregarious friend of mine once said: I don’t write love letters. In my opinion Here I Stand was a pretty impressive album, although it didn’t seem to resonate with the buying public. al) want to give it the opportunity to have the proper setup before coming out”. Apparantly it was delayed because “the album is so strong that we (Usher et.
Raymond is the title of Ushers next studio album which was initally supposed to be released before the turn of the year.