Lotusflow3r
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3 CD Set Features: Lotusflow3r/MPL Sound/Elixer: Bria Valentine…. More >>
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Product Description
3 CD Set Features: Lotusflow3r/MPL Sound/Elixer: Bria Valentine…. More >>
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My favourite songs from “MPLSound”, “Chocolate box” and “Dance 4 me”, sounds like “Lovesexy”‘s or “Batman”‘s outtakes, and “No more candy 4U” is like the censored version of “Jack U off”. It’s not a problem by itself, but where’s the innovative Prince? It happens the same with the “Lotusflow3r” cd: it seems the 2nd part of the excellent vhs release “The undertaker”. And Bria Valente’s album is simply routinary with the exception of “All this love”; the rest is like “Journey 2 the center of your heart” mixed with Sheila E’s “Boy’s club”. Great sound -as always- but poor composition.
Rating: 3 / 5
As a fan of Prince for many years i a new prince album is always a welcome event. Some of his stuff recently hasn’t overly impressed me until Planet Earth the free album given away at the concert and with a news paper. But this 3 album set hits me and had me grinning ear to ear. Its funky, soulful, rocky. Prince known for his little amount of covers slips in a cover of the Bee Gees Crimson and Clover which also includes Wild Thing by the Troggs but with an added brilliant Prince guitar solo. Fantastic album, both of them the rince ones.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a three-CD set containing two albums of new music by Prince and one by the impressivley gorgeous Bria Valente.
If Prince had taken the best tracks off Lotusflow3r and MPLSound and mashed them together, he would have made his best album since Sign O’ the Times. But, typically Prince, he puts out a three CD set and lets his fans pick though everything.
So, first we have MPLSound, which is probably the best Prince album since Lovesexy. All linn drums and meaty 80′s synths, Prince is having more fun here than he has for a long time. The pure pop joy of ‘Here’, the old school funk grooves of ‘Ol Skool Company’ and the more bluesy ‘Valentina’, the dirty dance-pop of ‘Chocolate Box’, the high-octane vocals of Camille on ‘Dance 4 Me’, the pure abandon of ‘No More Candy 4 U’ – everything you need to know about Prince is right here on this disc. And it’s a joy to hear. I haven’t stopped listening to this disc since I bought it three weeks ago. It’s a very ‘complete’ Prince album, and one that no true Prince fan will want to be without.
Lotusflow3r has been touted as Prince’s “return to the guitar” album, but if you’re expecting ‘Purple Rain’ style Hendrix-influenced workouts (as I was after reading the reviews) then you’ll be sorely disappointed. Perhaps it’s this disappointment which leads to me be less enamoured by this disc than I am of MPLSound.
‘Boom’ would fit perfectly onto ‘Around the World in a Day’ (not my favourite Prince album), but the opening and closing instrumentals just strike me as self-indulgent. In amongst these tracks however, there are some true jewels. ‘Dreamer’ is a contender for best song on the set – Hendrix-styled funk rock that reminds you of just how good Prince can be when he lives up to all those Hendrix comparisons he had to put up with when he first strapped on his guitar and rocked out. ‘Crimson & Clover’ is a nice light & fluffy mid-tempo Prince ballad which is more typical of his use of the guitar throughout Lotusflow3r – there’s also a nice cheeky wink to the Troggs ‘Wild Thing’ in the song. ‘Feel Good, Feel Better, Feel Wonderful’ is a feelgood ‘Rainbow Children’-era funk workout that wears it’s love of James Brown on it’s sleeve. ‘S’ is uptempo jazzy pop par excellance – it’s hard not to listen to this without getting a smile on your face. But the rest of the album contains too much filler for me, and Prince fans who’ve bought everything he’s put out over the last 20 years or so have plenty of that in our collections already.
Finally we come to Elixir, the Bria Valente disc. I think Prince has done a grave dis-service to both his fans and to Bria by including this album in this set. Bria is a not-outstanding but perfectly adequate RnB singer who sings songs exactly as you’d expect. She would be better off battling it out with the other pretenders to Beyonce’s crown, amongst whom she would probably find an appreciative fanbase. I’ve listened to the disc twice (which is at least once more than most people buying this set), but I bought the set to hear the Prince stuff. Like most Prince fans, it’s not a disc I intend to listen to again. It could make a particularly attractive coaster though……no offence Bria, you’re just not my cup of tea.
So there we have it – Prince’s latest offering undoubtedly contains his best set of music for years, but it could have been so much more. As a lifelong Prince fan I’m quite used to this, and hoping that his 21 nights in London had energised him into making music for the masses was it seems a dream too far. What we do have though is one disc that is worth owning for the diamonds in the rough (Lotusflow3r) and his best disc for about 20 years (MLPSound).
Rating: 4 / 5
I’ve been a Prince fan since 1983 / 1984, seeing him play live nine times so far, and simply put he’s one of the most incredible artists we’ve ever seen. However, since around 1990 he’s been in something of a decline, reaching its nadir with “Emancipation”, but over the last few years he’s showed signs of improvement. Although none of them were great, “Musicology”, “3121″ and “Planet Earth” showed some signs of life, and so the news that he was releasing a 3CD set was actually fairly promising, rather than something to dread.
Within the cheap, cardboard sleeve you will find three CDs, but no booklet. The three disks are all very different…
“Lotusflow3r” is the “rock” disk. It begins weakly with “From the Lotus”, a jazzy instrumental (there is a fair bit of jazz on this album), then the plodding “Boom”. Prince has clearly returned to the guitar with this album, but sadly the songs themselves just aren’t that good. Yes, there are some decent moments (“4Ever” is enjoyable; “Colonized Mind” is alright; “$” is bouncy and entertaining, and “Dreamer” is the best thing he’s done in years, although it is basically a retread of “Voodoo Chile” by Jimi Hendrix) but the poor tracks outweigh the good. Particularly weak moments include the opening and closing instrumentals, and “Love Like Jazz”, which sounds like the theme from a bad sitcom from the 1960s.
The second disk is a miscalculation. For me, Prince has always been best when he’s been himself, treading his own path, doing things which defy simple explanation, making sounds which seem bizarre (for example, some of the curious interjections in the likes of the “Purple Rain” and “Lovesexy” albums) and constantly redefining himself. He’s never gone back over old ground before, but with “MPLSound” he’s returned to his early 1980s sound of synthesizers and drum machines. It’s a very cold and sparse album due to the instrumentation, and the songs are very, very weak indeed. The best track is probably the closing “No More Candy 4U” but this is marred by its lyrics, which are rather hostile, particularly towards critics and fans who claim he’s not as good as he was (whoops – looks like I’m in trouble then), and the music is a rehash of “Jack U Off” from the “Controversy” album.
The third, and weakest, disk is “Elixer”, a collection of staggeringly bland R&B tracks sung by a lady called Bria Valente. One cannot help but imagine that Prince had invested in her for some reason (could it be that she is attractive?), wrote a set of songs for her, and the only way he could get anybody to release it was to bundle it with his latest album. It’s all very nice, and the kind of thing you could maybe imagine somebody putting on as background music, but it is extremely weak as an album. Having listened to it once, I very much doubt I’ll listen to it again.
It should be noted that in America, this album was released to be distributed in the shops of a single chain and cost around $12. If the price was similar over here I’d say it was worth buying, but it is absolutely, definitely not worth paying £30 for this. The songs may well sound tremendous when he eventually plays them live, but on record it’s a hugely disappointing collection.
Rating: 2 / 5
For those who think of the 80s classics such as Purple Rain and Kiss when they think of Prince, probably won’t be too bothered by this latest 3 disc release. To those who are aware of the genre-defying, immaculate live artist and musician that is Prince, Lotusflow3r will be welcomed with open arms. This is finally the record where Prince unleashes his Hendrix inspired guitar sound across a whole album, or is it? Anyone who has heard the lead single Crimson & Clover would surely rush out and buy the album, and anything else Prince related they can get their hands on. This fusion of the Tommy James hit and Wild Thing, is the best and most sweetest sounding track you’ll hear this year. The vocals are relaxed and sublime, the drums oozing with a jamming rhythm, and the cherry on the top is the minute-and-a-half long guitar solo outro, think Hendrix on Bold as Love.
Unfortunately, what we do not get is an album full of this sound, but rather half an album. If you take Crimson & Clover, Wall of Berlin, Boom, Colonized Mind and Dreamer, you have the opening of what would be an incredible rock and blues record. Colonized Mind follows a three chord pattern played in the Hendrix Stratocaster style, that builds to an all out rock climax. Dreamer is a modern day voodoo child, with a foot tapping, head nodding bass rhythm. Wall of Berlin, in reference to the opening track on Musicology, starts with what could be the best drum intro ever, and ends with another trademark live Prince jam-out.
However, despite apparently having hundreds of tracks in reserve, the rest of the album is essentially lightweight filler. Two tracks can be struck off for the needless and unmotivating intro/outro lotusflow3r tracks, whilst `Love Like Jazz’ and `77 Berlin Park’ appear dull when contrasted with penultimate track `Dreamer’. In closing, the peaks on this record are as high as anything he’s done previously, it’s just a shame that once again you’d have to compare a Prince album to the football team that is carried by a couple of star players.
Rating: 4 / 5