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'There Goes My Baby' shows that slow jams can be catchy as well as steamy, while 'Foolin' Around' recalls his hugely successful Confessions cut 'Burn'.
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RAYMOND VS RAYMOND COVER USHER CRACK
Raymond does contain evidence that Usher can still crack out a decent tune if he wants to. Sadly, the remaining tracks about sex, troubled relationships and, er, more sex, are so lacking in variety that the album can't help feeling one-dimensional and bland.įortunately, Raymond Vs. The album's 15-strong production task, which includes hitmakers Jam & Lewis (Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson), Danja (Britney Spears, Madonna) and Sean Garrett (Beyoncé, Chris Brown), keep things moving at a strictly bump n' grind pace throughout, briefly chaning gear for recent chart-topper 'OMG', a will.i.am-helmed club banger which sticks out like a diamond in the rough. "Tonight we gonna do a lot of sexin'", the 31-year-old father-of-two promises on 'Hey Daddy (Daddy's Home)', while 'So Many Girls' finds him professing to be a hit with the ladies on an international scale: "Asian, Caucasian, Bajan, Jamaican - I got a million." On tracks like these – especially 'Guilty', on which he admits to "leaving and having a little fun" - it's hard to sympathise with the man who seemingly couldn't sign "them papers" fast enough. US buzz single and album track 'Papers' addresses the sore topic most explicitly, with Usher proclaiming: "I'm ready to sign them papers." In fact, the singer lays out the reasons for the end of his marriage - "I know it's you I love / But then I also know it's you I don't like" - almost as if it were a piece of raw meat, filleted and splayed across the butcher's block and left for the gossip rags to pick clean.įor much of the record, Usher seems keen to retract Stand's pro-monogamy message and trade it back for the sex-frenzied midtempo R&B of yore. Raymond finds Usher, somewhat inevitably, drawing on the breakdown of his marriage. However, less than two years later, the singer has dramatically shifted the subject matter for his latest offering, the rather ominously-titled Raymond vs. The last Usher album, 2008's Here I Stand, heralded the R&B star's growth from a libido-raging twenty-something to A Grown Man indulging in what he termed "the true makings of love" with then-wife Tameka Foster.