One of the music industry trends I've been giving a lot of thought to lately is the move toward making 'deluxe' versions of albums, usually the victory lap afforded to megasellers that have already been on shelves for a few months or a year, a more frequent consumer option for new releases these days. It's not really a new thing per se, there's been bonus DVDs and stuff tacked onto more expensive versions of new albums for quite a while now. But the difference now is that artists of all levels of popularity are getting deluxe versions, and more and more it feels like the deluxe version is the proper, complete album that the artist wanted, and the cheaper, shorter one that most customers get is the barebones compromise the label was happy with. A few months ago, I praised Robin Thicke's Sex Therapy: The Experience, which is only 11 minutes longer than Sex Therapy: The Session, but the difference is in several intro/interlude and solo tracks that form the connective tissue that make the guest-heavy Session tracks feel more like a cohesive album. The deluxe version of Raheem DeVaughn's new album The Love & War MasterPeace is a far more extreme use of the concept -- it's the 2-hour double album that he'd been talking about releasing for the past year, but the main retail version is simply the first disc, just over half the length of the real deal.

As much as I enjoyed DeVaughn's 2nd album, 2008's Love Behind The Melody, that one hour of music was such a meal of willfully eclectic R&B that it's really about as much ambition as I can handle from a guy who I ultimately think is only moderately talented and not terribly original. Its slow jams were lovely, its club songs surprisingly capable, but once "Customer" hit he seemed to think he was ready for the ringtone R&B big time, cutting a terrible new single "Text Messages" intended for a deluxe reissue of the album that was scrapped once the song justifiably flopped. And the first couple singles off The Love & War MasterPeace (ugh that title) took him even further off the course: "Bulletproof" featuring Ludacris aimed for Marvin Gaye and ended up with a "Runaway Love"-era Luda snore, and the Ne-Yo-penned "I Don't Care" sounds like something he scrapped off the bottom of his shoe circa In My Own Words.

It was Matt Cibula that convinced me I needed to hear not just MasterPeace but the whole deluxe version, if only for the 11-minute hip house throwback epic "Lose Control." And he's right, that song is incredible and incredibly fun, possibly one of my favorite songs of the year so far. And the 2nd bonus disc of the album also includes my other favorite song on the record, the dark slow burn of "Hopeless Romantic." Unfortunately, hearing those songs means hearing the whole overkill double album, which is even more indulgent and unrewarding than I'd feared. Having Cornel West host your album is a cute idea in theory, but if his interludes, which are mostly annoying and have zero replay value, end up taking up almost 12 minutes of the album (6 of the non-deluxe version) something is terribly terribly wrong. "Microphone" is kind of Raheem's deliberate attempt at writing an R. Kelly song after he kind of did it by accident with "Customer," and "B.O.B." (which stands for "battery operated boyfriend") is clever in a way DeVaughn really just doesn't have the balls to pull off -- Kells or one of his other more animated nu-R&B disciples would make it hilarious, but Radio Raheem just deadpans it. And then there's that whole Marvin-aping protest soul angle of much of the album, about which the less said the better. Unfortunately, I can't say that the deluxe package was a bad idea, because if his label had been forced to pare the album down to just their vague idea of its most accessible possible incarnation, we'd probably never get a chance to hear "Lose Control."

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 4:02 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.