Yahoo! Music Review

Released on 02/04/07
Label: Mosley Music/Interscope

Tim "Timbaland" Mosley enjoys an enviable position in popular music's hierarchy. Any pop star worth their salt will take his call, and any rap A&R desperate to launch a new career or resuscitate a flagging one will have his number on speed-dial, and won't have to remind the accounts department of the Virginia Beach producer's bank details. Yet Timbaland's records in his own right have always been frustrating affairs. For every future-funk hit he crafted for Missy Elliott, Aaliyah or Jay-Z, there was another Timbaland and Magoo album flogging its by-rote raps and tired-sounding beats; or a "Tim's Bio", the 1998 album that tried - and failed - to turn Mosley from backroom genius to frontman.

The notion of a Timbaland solo record seduces us in the same manner as an all-you-can-eat offer at pizza restaurant. We know they won't have the toppings we want, and the pizza, sat under the hot lamp for an hour, will have gone beyond chewy into the realm of the plastic and indigestible: but it's been so long since we last tried it, and we want it to work so much, we delude ourselves into a selective bout of amnesia, and give it another go. It has been nearly a decade since "Tim's Bio", and four years since "Under Construction Pt II", Timbaland and Magoo's third underachieving album; so we approach "Shock Value" and its enchantingly bizarre cast list (Justin Timberlake; Elton John; The Hives; Dr Dre) with high hopes and enhanced expectations.

Yet this lumpen, bloated, boring album is as much of a let-down as any of Timbaland's other "solo" works. There are moments of the musical invention that mark the man's music: the Nina Simone sample that underscores opener "Oh Timbaland" is clever and reasonably witty; "Bounce"'s beat is crafted from a sampled laugh. But "Shock Value"'s only shock is how badly used many of the guests are (Elton John tinkles away to no discernable purpose on the overlong and underwhelming "2 Man Show"; The Hives seem to have been brought in to play one guitar riff for "Throw It On Me"), and how turgid, tuneless and unmemorable an album they've all had a hand in making.

Worse, Mosley is still labouring under the misapprehensions that the most exciting sounds in pop music were created on synthesisers in the 1980s; that Gothic and baroque keyboard flourishes are inherently interesting; and that his own self-absorbed lyrics are even slightly entertaining. Instead, this curling slice of stale Margherita, with its overcoooked ideas and unsatisfactory in-jokes, just adds to an unfathomably woeful catalogue of nominally solo work that cannot hold a candle to the tracks Mosley comes up with during the day job.

    by Angus Baatey