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Prince – Lotusflow3r Review
Posted by Michael Melchor on 04.03.2009

Three discs at about $4 apiece. Two worth a little more; one worth significantly less.

Leave it to Prince to be a little unorthodox. For the first multi-disc set in 13 years (since Emancipation, but not counting the live document One night Alone…Live! in 2002), Prince played three shows in one day in LA and one show for three nights on “The Tonight Show”.

Yeah, all this three and one stuff had a point. Prince was promoting the Lotusflow3r collection – a three disc set that would only be available at one* location – your local Target store. (* - That is, if you don’t count his new website, but good luck negotiating that one.)

The three-disc set, though, comes with a catch – only two of them are fully his and one he merely produced and co-wrote. In an admittedly smart marketing move, Prince took this opportunity to introduce his newest girlfriend? protégé, Bria Valentine. Her debut album, Elixer [sic] makes up the third part of this set. And we’ll start with her to get it out of the way...

...because there’s not that much remarkable here, really. Come to think of it, Prince’s track record with female “protégés” doesn’t hold up that well at all; I can’t think of one that really made a real go of any sort of career without him. Listening to Elixer, Valentine doesn’t sound like she’ll be an exception.

Much of Elixer, save for the overall signature sound of Prince’s production (which almost could have been a lost Madhouse album if Valentine’s vocals were completely removed), seems to keep all the tired-and-true modern R&B conventions in place. Sexy come-ons? Check (“2Nite”). Soft ballads? Check (“Something U Already Know”). Party tracks? Check (“Home”). A groan-inducing shout-out to Minneapolis? Check (“Another Boy”). Yep, it’s all there – including a possible inadvertent admission to her current position (“Kept Woman”).

Valentine could really use her own sound and style; someone should have told her that being backed by Prince doesn’t necessarily equal a start at a career, much less a full one. Her vocal stylings are fair enough, but it’s not nearly enough to make any sort of impression at all.

Instead of using three full paragraphs to talk about the non-Prince disc, I probably could have summed it up a lot simpler by saying: imagine The Pussycat Dolls backed by Prince. Yeah, that’s about it.

Now then, the reason(s) people would buy the disc in the first place:

Lotusflow3r starts out with an instrumental intro, “From The Lotus”. What sounds like it may explode any second settles into a jazzy, guitar-driven overture of sorts. For Lotusflow3r, Prince plans to keep it laid-back, playful, and maybe a little trippy. “Boom” keeps that theme with a lackadaisical rhythm but one of his nastier guitar solos in the last few years. Prince’s redux of “Crimson & Clover” wasn’t in the style I would have hoped for, but in keeping with the more playful tone of the album as a whole, it fits right in (even with the interpolation of “Wild Thing” in the chorus).

The works of Prince in this set seem to fit their own purposes. MPLSound we’ll get to in a moment, but Lotusflow3r is the “good kid” of this twin set. Many of the songs are good-natured fun grounded in a little bit of funk but more in Prince’s guitar work. Some of the themes are familiar, but then who the hell would expect Prince to do a political record or something like that? It’s all about love and a good party, and some of the hooks he uses (particularly in “$” and “Feel Good, Feel Better, Feel Wonderful”) are some of the catchiest in the past few albums.

Ironically, what’s a little more muddled is the production. Prince’s musicianship is fully intact and on display here; if anyone’s left out there that doubts that the man knows what he’s doing in terms of playing music, then he’s glad to show them just how well he can play a guitar (which many tend to overlook) before there’s little to no hope for the coming generations to know what music is. However, there are parts when it could have come through a bit clearer than it does. Maybe this is on purpose, but I couldn’t fathom a reason why for the life of me.

Even with the occasional production woes, Lotusflow3r is a nice addition to the Prince canon. “Nice” being meant both in terms of quality (not one of the most outstanding, but certainly nowhere near the bottom) and in overall mood. Now we get to the “bad cop” of the two...

stupid

ahaha! Thats one review totaly missing his artistic eye.

you can tell this as he prefers 3121, Musicology.

Overall a decent review

I wouldn't mind if they opened 4 P.