It is with some awkwardness — confusion? — that I must inform
you that the first voice you hear on the new Justin Bieber album, “Justice,” is
Martin Luther King Jr.’s.: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice
everywhere.” King returns mid-album, on an interlude that samples a speech
about how a life without conviction and passion is no life at all, which is
absolutely true.
اضافة اعلان
King’s calls to action are, indisputably, powerful — they should
be heard widely. And yet, as a framing device for an album by the 27-year-old
pop star, they feel unanchored: a Big Gesture in search of equivalently
ambitious commitment — political, spiritual, emotional — to bolster it.
It only calls attention to the persistent underlying conundrum
with all things Bieber, which is that despite some indelible hits, his fame
vastly outpaces his catalog, and that throughout his career — in ways overt or
reluctant, destructive or self-protective — he has never rested in one place
for very long, nor sought to make a case for his own particularity.
That’s why his last album, “Changes,” full of medium-stakes
R&B well-suited to his lightly silky voice, was one of his most successful.
It wasn’t a runaway success, but it was coherent and soothing, and notably free
of baggage. It was also a reminder that perhaps Justin Bieber the musician and
performer isn’t actively interested in — or an especially good fit for — the
scale of song ordinarily mandated for someone as popular as Justin Bieber the
celebrity.
The disorganized, only sporadically strong “Justice,” though,
feels like a slap on the wrist to “Changes,” or the version of Bieber it
nurtured. Rather than settle for one groove, this album shuttles between several:
quasi new wave, Christian pop, acoustic soul, and many more. Instead “Justice”
(RBMG/Def Jam Recordings), Bieber’s sixth studio album, is full of songs that
feel like production exercises lightly spritzed with some Eau de Bieber, the
musical equivalent of merchandise.
A host of guest features serve as opportunities to try on
different guises, with varying levels of success. The production of “Love You
Different,” with dancehall rapper Beam, nods wanly to the Caribbean, but
nowhere near as effectively as Bieber’s 2015 smash “Sorry.” Nigerian star Burna
Boy appears on “Loved by You,” but Bieber doesn’t match his guest’s casual
gravitas.
“Die for You” is perhaps the most ambitious stylistic collision
here. An up-tempo, synthetic duet with upstart pop slacker Dominic Fike, it
harks back to the mid-1980s, but Bieber isn’t the sort of power singer who can
outperform the flamboyance of the production. The same is true on “Unstable,”
with the Kid Laroi, an Australian singer-rapper who’s adept at a post-Juice
WRLD whine — Bieber sings earnestly, while his partner leans into the anguish.
Of the collaborations, by far the most successful is “Peaches,”
a sun-dappled and slinky R&B number featuring rising stars Daniel Caesar
and Giveon, that finds Bieber at his most vocally flexible (though he was in
even better vocal form when he debuted this song, solo, on NPR’s Tiny Desk
Concert).
More often, though, “Justice” attempts to impose big-tent pop
onto Bieber — the John Hughes movie chords on “Hold On,” or the runway-walk bop
of “Somebody.” In places, like on “Ghost,” those impulses are at least leavened
with acoustic guitar, and the shift in his singing is notable — he goes from an
accent piece to the main character.
Lyrically, “Justice” focuses on songs about triumph over
regrettable behavior, about preaching devotion to a more powerful entity — a
wife, a God — who didn’t abandon you in a time of need. “You prayed for me when
I was out of faith/you believed in me when ain’t nobody else did/It’s a miracle
you didn’t run away,” he sings, pointedly, on “As I Am.”
At the end of the album is “Lonely,” a moving piano ballad he
released last October that felt like the cleanest break with his former self
that he’d ever committed to song. These songs are Bieber at his most self-referential,
his least cluttered and also his strongest — they book end a persistent,
intimate sentiment running through an album that does everything it can to
distract from it.
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