Review Summary: That's when it starts to fade.
The 20/20 Experience was (and is) JT's opus, to be sure, an ambitious project with detailed and fluid music that brought a lot of challenging and fun sounds to 2010's pop music. The world was going to be looking at Timberlake's next release with a much more critical eye than before, so I'm sure it came as a genuine surprise when
20/20 Experience 2 of 2 came out the
same year as Part 1. Market saturation notwithstanding,
2 of 2 following so close on the heels of
20/20 Part 1 was strange because of Timberlake's noted tendency to take hiatuses and breaks - years-long breaks - inbetween albums. To this day,
2 of 2 remains the sole exception to the rule in JT's entire discography... and perhaps that's exactly why it wound up being such a strange, disjointed mess.
"Gimme What I Don't Know" is a banger of an opener, fooling you into thinking the album's going to be just as good as Part 1 right off the bat with an icy, futuristic beat that flirts with airy, spacious synths and sharp, spiky drum patterns. It's a sexy, swaggering electro-funk jam, and God, does it make the adjacent "True Blood" that much more disappointing. "True Blood" is an awkward, meandering track that quickly ruins everything - Timberlake vocally trips and stumbles throughout the song's erratic vocal melodies and the instrumentation has no idea what it's doing, a baffling blend of Middle Eastern textures and dark synthfunk that *could* have been interesting but winds up being far too convoluted and
far too lengthy for its own good. "Cabaret" exists squarely in the middle of these two tracks, quality-wise - the cozy Latin vibe of the track is a lot of fun, and it's given some swagger by a shockingly fire set of verses by an unusually-enjoyable Drake feature, but it's also a messy smorgasbord of aimless beatboxing, rapid-fire drumwork, and smooth synthwork, a strange, insurmountable blender of influences that just don't click together like they should.
Inconsistency and whiplash plague
2 of 2 to its core, and this is a problem that it's never able to shake over the course of its runtime. On one hand, some of the best songs in Timberlake's entire discography are present on this album. "Murder" is a pretty sick minor-key beat with stomping Latin percussion and big, funky horn sections; Jay-Z doesn't bring much to the track, struggling to bring a coherent flow to the track's off-kilter, syncopated groove, but Timberlake and Timbaland keep the intensity and swagger going. "TKO" slaps - the whole thing sounds like a holdover from
FutureSex / LoveSounds with its trance-club beat, warm atmosphere, stuttering instrumentation, and JT's crystal-clear vocal harmonies as the musical cherry on top, grooving along with the swagger of "My Love" and the anthemic drive of "Mirrors" all in one. The dramatic, swelling string-section stabs, staccato acoustic guitar, and cavernous backing vocals of "Amnesia" are a winning combination, and "You Got It On" is a jewel of a song. Ethereal, elegant pads, candy-sweet falsetto, and delicate keys - it's downright heavenly, and it's pitch-perfect moments like these that elevate
2 of 2 up to the prestige and status of its predecessor...
...Only for tracks like the boring, corny, disco-tainted "Take Back The Night" and the goofy drinking anthem "Drink You Away" to knock it down a peg. "Take Back The Night" is particularly dreadful - there's nothing unique about it whatsoever, the whole track sounding like a carbon copy of both JT's own "Suit and Tie" and the immeasurably-stronger "Get Lucky" (which, given the release date, had to be intentional to at least some degree). Perhaps the most patience-testing and exasperating aspect of
2 of 2 is the fact that its setlist full of songs that are f*cking
long. Yes,
20/20 Experience Part 1 had some long songs, but they managed to justify their length pretty effectively -
2 of 2 is not so lucky. Over half of its tracks eventually cross the threshold where you just want them to be over already, demonstrated by cuts like the nine-minute "True Blood", the seven-minute "Only When I Walk Away", and the six-minute "Take Back The Night", all of which could have essentially been cut in half without any major damages. The seemingly
eleven-minute album closer "Not A Bad Thing" is a strange case - it's secretly a combination of two tracks, the pleasant, AOR-influenced "Not A Bad Thing" and the stripped-down, surprisingly subtle pop ballad "Pair of Wings". Both of these songs are enjoyable on their own, especially the gentle and sensitive "Pair of Wings"... but they don't mesh together well in the slightest (there's not even a damn transition or a shared key/chord to bridge the two tracks together, just a fade-out, an awfully lazy move on the interlude-loving Timbaland's part), and they're both just a little too long, resulting in an eleven-minute mess that perfectly encapsulates the overlong mess that is the entire record.
2 of 2 is messy and unfocused, its manic energy and inability to stylistically settle down shading into unpleasant chaos at times. And with the longest running-time of JT's entire discography,
2 of 2 certainly wears out its welcome. Its flaws are more glaringly obvious than
1 of 1's were - the light, breezy, unimaginative lyrics can't hide behind ambitious, zesty beats like "Strawberry Bubblegum" and "Tunnel Vision", and Timbaland is in surprisingly poor form this time around, his beats and production stylings more crowded and polluted than before. Admittedly, it's hard to call
2 of 2 bad - the good (and sometimes great) tracks stick with you, and Timberlake himself consistently manages to work his vocal magic throughout the record, bringing a lot of charisma and confidence to the table (even on clinkers like "Only When I Walk Away", JT's surprisingly passionate vocals keep you engaged). It's good more often than not, but
2 of 2 needed more time to cook in the oven - its promising musical ideas are often muddied in execution, and the lack of an identifiable hit song to give
2 of 2 a reliable center weakens its presence as a standalone record - it winds up feeling more like a collection of snappy B-sides than anything else, and that's ultimately the reason why it's hard to care about it all that much, highlights and all.
