Review Summary: Haters gonna say it's fake.
Eyebrows were raised at the announcement of Justin Timberlake going "southern" in early 2018 - mine certainly were, anyway, and for damn good reason. Justin Timberlake is many things - a pop star, a practiced vocalist, a charismatic frontman with a lot of interesting songs under his belt and a
lot of interesting talent backing him up (The Neptunes, Timbaland, et cetera). But one thing he is not is
rugged. Justin Timberlake, as a person, does
not go hard, does not go raw, and this is something he's always struggled to grasp given his occasional attempts at acting edgy and acting like a thug in the past. He's more of a stylish upper-class socialite that made it big than a man with any earthly, folkish charm. So the prospect of this glitzy, club-ready rich boy donning a cowboy hat seemed ludicrous, and wouldn't you know it, it actually
was, resulting in the first genuine stinker of Timberlake's entire discography, the first of five albums where the bad truly outweighed the good (compared to the pretty evenly-matched good-to-bad-ratio of
The 20/20 Experience - 2 of 2).
Man of the Woods is vacuous, unimaginative, bland...
...And it couldn't even really be
country throughout. There is almost
nothing southern about "Filthy", the ill-advised album opener, beyond the light drawl present in JT's voice. "Filthy" is an utter disaster. Irritating, wobbly dubstep bass, screaming synth samples, and Justin Timberlake's monstrously annoying yelps (
"ver-SHUN, o-PEN") and "tough boy" delivery ruin the funky, robotic beat beneath it all. Why was
this the track chosen to kick things off? The Taylor Swift-derived country stylings of the otherwise Jason Mraz-y "The Hard Stuff" feel more like an afterthought than anything else, the whole song sounding more like a bubblegum pop snoozefest that came out ten-fifteen years too late, and the only reason the burst of pure cultural appropriation that is "Supplies" qualifies as 'southern' is because of trap's A-Town origins. "Supplies" is the nadir of the album for a damn good reason - JT's nightmarish, tryhard, evil vocal delivery of
"SUPPLI-I-IIIES" soils a genuinely-interesting trap-pop beat, a beat that sounds almost medieval in places with its regal sitar strings and sepulchral reverb. But you won't be paying attention to that beneath JT's BRRAH's and SKRRT's and delusional lyrics about doomsday-preparation that paint a picture of a man losing his f*cking mind.
Like, God, even when it's convincingly "southern",
Man of the Woods is just embarrassing more often than not. The lazy slide guitars and Nashville twang of the title track literally sounds like a parody of country music. How was this taken seriously by anyone involved in the project? This is the kind of song you use to mock country music instead of upholding and honoring it. "Flannel" is the lamest hybrid of Justin Vernon and Phillip Phillips you've ever heard that's further annihilated by a mismatched and horribly-unfitting trap beat in the background, and "Livin' Off The Land" is a stale, bland, empty-sounding jam that sounds like a carbon copy of at least five other JT tracks and straight up sounds like it's missing instruments somehow. The latter half of
Man of the Woods is by and large dominated by the worst material on the album, capped off by the garbage closer "Young Man", with its flat, reggae-influenced beat and boring, drain-circling hook that threatens to plagiarize Shaggy and Rayvon's "Angel" in several places. For a boy supposedly hailing from Memphis and wanting to tap into his "roots", Timberlake seems to have completely forgotten what it is that makes those "roots" of his click. (There's an interesting psychological story in there, a cautionary tale of how stardom and fame can distance you from your humbler origins to the point where it feels like appropriation should you decide to dip into that pool, but that's an essay for another time.)
Man of the Woods is an assuredly weaker project than anything JT's ever put out, but even conceding all of that, there's a handful of genuinely good tracks here and there. "Midnight Summer Jam" is a palate-cleanser after the aptly-named "Filthy", the booming, unorthodox percussion and off-kilter chord progressions of Neptunes fame accentuated by funky guitars and hoedown-worthy violins and harmonica. The boxy percussion, moody electric piano, and pitch-bent electric guitar embellishments of "Higher Higher" create a groovy but heavy atmosphere that clicks together surprisingly well - it's simultaneously classy and unrefined, much like the plaintive "Say Something", a soul-tinged country pop jam with a tasteful and thoroughly enjoyable Chris Stapleton feature, whose coarse warbling meshes together with JT's boyish tenor like milk and cereal. There's a few other high points here and there - the acid funk production of "Montana" and psychedelic stylings of "Breeze Off The Pond" make for an effective duo, and "Sauce" is dominated by chromatic, rock-tinged Neptuneisms: a bombastic, processed drum kit, distorted guitars, and a lively vocal performance that screams "Jay Kay and Prince lovechild".
Moments like these are refreshing, but they're also distractions from the overall ineptitude of the entire project. It's a fumbling mess of ideas - why have the Neptunes on board when they've never shown a penchant for country music? Why waste an Alicia Keys feature on a middling honky-tonk track like "Morning Light", a track that doesn't even show off her strengths as a vocalist? Why the stupid, cringe Jessica Biel interlude? Why center an entire song around f*cking
flannel?? Why?
Man of the Woods is gimmicky from start to finish, and it's hard to shake that pandering feeling even in the best moments of the record - it feels like JT never set his sights higher than just trying to prove that he could write country tunes, in spite of the fact that his ability to make country tunes is not at all so naturalistic as his gift for pop bangers. The whole album feels deeply impersonal as a result, and with sixteen tracks, there is simply
too much of it, too much sound and fury without personality and depth. It all lacks a soul even though it steals the soul from somewhere else - it's so telling that the hook of what might be the album's biggest hit muses, without a hint of irony: "
sometimes the greatest way to say something is to say nothing at all."
