Seeing Sounds

Only slip up was adding track 11(A American Boy like record. Other than that this is a very solid album.

Top Songs:
Anti Matter
Spaz
Sooner or Later (Tour-De-Force, killer guitar,the song starts off slow and then builds up to this mind blowing finale)
Happy
Kill Joy
Love Bomb
Laugh About It

As with many of my "Pop" music purchases, this one was made because it was Amazon's MP3 Daily Deal. I am not very knowledgeable when it comes to this particular genre (it all sounds like "rap" to me), so I read other opinions in order to gain some knowledge as to what I was listening for.

The basis is a looped (minimalistic, John Cage influenced) track very common in hip-hop, rap, techno, dance & other pop music styles. There are original lyrics, although the tendency is to repeat phrases over & over (also part of the minimalistic influence?).

The first track is probably the most original of the entire recording. You can see that the artists made a real effort to leave the listener with an unanswered question in their mind, and that's what good music does... asks questions... sometimes resolving/answering, and sometimes not.

The second portion of the album gives almost some old-time Marvin Gaye or Isley Brother influenced vocals, with gentle crooning, nice harmonies, and easy, driving beats. But there is definitely a modern jive to the thing with more of the electronic mastering throughout the album.

I read the sentiment that listeners would prefer that the two styles were combined, but I am unsure how that would be done without creating an unpleasant chaos. I actually like the different styles. It helps to keep my attention on the music.

Good job. Don't know that I'd buy from these guys again, but it was worth the $3.99.

A beautiful blend of punk rock and soul music, it's ear candy for the open-minded.

Given the amount of work and wide disparity of ideas the Neptunes have done and thought up over the years in the realms of pop music, it comes as little surprise that their slightly more rock-oriented side project N.E.R.D. (with rapper friend Shay) is about as cohesive as a jar of silly putty. With Seeing Sounds, their third album, N.E.R.D. has created a colorful stew of random pop detritus marinated in a simmering combination of divergent genres. The theme of this album is it has no theme; each song is as different from the one before it as Miley Cyrus is from Trent Reznor.

Seeing Sounds, in effect, comes off as the epitome of throwing everything and the kitchen-sink into what can only very loosely be called a rock album. Just listen to the opener "Time For Some Action": it starts off a `50s sitcom string part (which, by the way, strangely kept reminding me of the work on The Sims) and Pharrell's spoken-word tale about how he started, uh, seeing sounds before a mean drum `n bass beat comes in and Pharrell reminds us to "turn this bitch up here we go."

On "Time For Some Action," this mad-scientist amalgam of different sounds and styles works. Other songs pull it off as well, such as the magnificently poppy doo-wop of "Windows" and the club banger "Anti Matter" with its very millennial chant of "you jump around like you're ADHD!"

Pharrell thankfully keeps the rapping to a minimum on this record, and he tends to shy away from the falsetto that can easily ruin a good Neptunes track. Nevertheless, N.E.R.D. are at their best when they're making a relentlessly hypnotic jam like album highlight "Spaz," which bounces around on loose, ricocheting snares, a horror-show synth, and an irrepressibly memorable chorus.

With all the ideas Pharrell and company pump out on this record, it should be no surprise that a good many of them fall flat. First single "Everyone Nose (All The Girls Standing In The Line For The Bathroom)" has a Neptunes-worthy beat and some of Pharrell's best lyrics on the album. But the criminally annoying titular chant kills any momentum the song might have had.

Seeing Sounds can almost neatly be divided cleanly down the middle, with the first half generally consisting of more Neptunes-ish dance tracks and the latter more funk rock-ish material. Not surprisingly, the second half is weaker all-around, disrupted by half-baked ideas or poorly executed designs. "Sooner or Later" sounds like a second-rate Ben Folds song with an out-of-place guitar freakout at the end, and "Kill Joy" resembles early Red Hot Chili Peppers, in a very bad way.

By the end of the album N.E.R.D. seems to lose steam, the last few songs stuck in various ideas that fail to develop much beyond their origins save for bright spot "You Know What," a disco-tinged tune that is a welcome breath of relaxation amidst the walls of sounds around it.

N.E.R.D. have certainly accomplished making a record that is more wildly diverse than their Neptunes work and even their previous albums, but they have yet to master the pop chemistry that makes the Neptunes the kings of music production. Just because you can throw everything into a song doesn't necessarily mean you should, something the Neptunes learned long ago but that N.E.R.D. seem to have forgotten in their excitement at being able to put to record every random musical thought they were never able to use.

Fantastic album of the usual NERD beats and breaks although a bit more mellow than their older albums. Can't say much more - Love it!