This is from the same paper that commented on how prince is echoed everywhere in the current music scene and gave a glowing review of TRC just 2 weeks ago!

POP CD OF THE WEEK: PRINCE The Rainbow Children (NPG Redline RDL700422 )
Import

DEPENDING on your view of psychology, that Prince Rogers Nelson was raised a Seventh Day Adventist may or may not explain why he became a sexual libertine when he hit adulthood, or why he has recently become a convert to the Jehovah's Witnesses. The first a reaction against his puritan upbringing, the second a return to it at the age of 42.

Whatever, Prince has gone and found God, and made himself a concept album to prove it. The Rainbow Children intends to do no less than renew God's covenant with humanity - the one promised by the rainbow following Noah's flood - and to pledge a new generation to do 'The Work' to bring about His Kingdom on Earth. As ever, you can't fault Prince for lack of ambition. Like most concept albums, from Sergeant Pepper on, this one groans under its own conceit. While its music slips between the inspired and the insipid, the half-speed voice that joins its 14 tracks - sorry, 'chapters' - into a fuzzy storyline merely gets in the way. It would help if the narrator wasn't handing down such Old Testament insights as the necessity for women to 'surrender' their understanding of God's law to their man. Musically, the album reprises familiar Princely styles - the delicate falsetto balladry of 'Muse 2 the Pharaoh', the routine funk of '1+1+1 is 3' - while adding a strand of jazz-funk and, on the mercifully short 'Wedding Feast', a burst of cod-operatics a la Queen.

There's homage to James Brown on 'The Work', a furious, horn-driven work-out complete with grunts which swaps Brown's exhortations to 'get down and get funky' for lines like 'we're living in a system the devil designed'. Bizarre. Throughout, P rince gives a forceful reminder of his prowess as a guitarist, shifting impressively between cool jazz licks and grandstanding hard-rock solos.

Prince's new-found faith has its infectious moments. It's refreshing to hear the former fleshpot revel in being a one-woman man on 'She Loves Me 4 Me'. 'Family Name', a critique of US racism, is slinkily insistent. The closing 'Last December' is a tour de force which questions life's purpose in simple, eloquent terms. Yet like many rocking vicars before him - Cliff, Dylan, Marley - the born-again Prince proves that the necessity to impart The Word often gets in the way of creating the music. NEIL SPENCER

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This is an excerpt from the article written on the 4th Nov by the same guy Neil Spencer. Two very different reviews of the same album by the same guy in the same newspaper just a month apart.
hmmm.

"Most of those buying The Very Best Of probably haven't bothered with recent Prince albums, but it's too early to consign him to the retro bin. This month sees the US release of a new album, Rainbow Children , which comes trailed as his fiercest creation since his heyday and one inspired by a recent brush with religion. Spiritual pronouncements are hardly new to Prince - he claimed that his decision to change his name (and hence shuck his contract) was on the advice of his 'guardian angel' - but his access to the divine has invariably been through the pleasures of the flesh. Now he's writing songs called 'The Work' and singing of 'a theocratic order' and living through 'the last days of the devil'. Fears of a Dylan-style born-again conversion, perhaps the result of the personal tragedy surrounding his miscarried child, are probably misplaced, however. In one song, 'Family Name', he asks 'Preacher is it true / Jesus wants me to give my money to you / So you can drive round in your Lexus?' He may yet have produced a record to set alongside his last state-of-the-world album, 1987's Sign O' The Times

To match the shift from sex to salvation Prince's musical focus has moved from funk and flamboyant rock to jazz. One critic has described it as 'futurist, Las Vegas supper-club jazz'. Maybe Prince is finally claiming the birthright of his father, a jazz musician from whom he became estranged at the age of 13.

Deliverance from record company slavery has arrived from cyberspace. You can already download Rainbow Children from Prince's own website if you're a premium member of his NPG Music Club (fee Dollars 100 per annum), while a Dollars 7.77 monthly subscription will give you a minimum of three tracks a month. Since the site received 15,000 downloads on its first day, Prince seems unlikely to be following other dotcom startups into oblivion. "