2 b honest after listening to this album everyday for the past 2 weeks, there hasn't been a song that has been a real stand out, even though Way Back Home is a great track, the essence and lyrics are meaningfull absolutely but it's missing something...

AOA is a STRONG ALBUM over all. How it flows all in one, that's whats been missing in the recent Prince albums, maybe there are better songs on 20TEN, LotusFlower, 3121, Musicology but those albums don't flow as well as AOA.

Personally there is no stand out song on AOA, for me a stand out song on an album is like When Doves Cry from PR or Fury from 3121 or Joy n Repetition from GB, every Prince album has one.

AOA doesn't have a stand out song to me personally, the stand out song for me was Another Love from PE.

But, besides that, all the songs are good, one filler to me, might be more to others but AOA in my opinion is not bad at all. It's a strong album, is it great, no, is it trail blaizing, no. Is it comparable to his 80s work, of course not. But for 2014, for the Prince in 2014, AOA is a strong solid album.

20Ten as an album as a WHOLE is not strong, neither is LotusFlower or Planet Earth as a whole... AOA is his best recent release.

[Edited 10/3/14 19:16pm]

Im just glad we have a great album finally in our hands. I was getting so tired of waiting for a new one and I must say he didn't leave me dissapointed. AOA has great highlights and wonderful production. I love everything about it. Expectations exceeded!

I hate to say it, but i dont have high expectations from Prince any more

But over all i guess i'd say it exceeded my expectations i was quite pleased

Though i dont think its his best album since TGE or Rainbowchildren Its way better than 20Ten and Planet Earth

FragileUndertow said:

I hate to say it, but i dont have high expectations from Prince any more

But over all i guess i'd say it exceeded my expectations i was quite pleased

Though i dont think its his best album since TGE or Rainbowchildren Its way better than 20Ten and Planet Earth

I agree with u. It's his best album out of all the recents, better than LotusFlower, Planet Earth and 20Ten as an album as a WHOLE.

I'm with you here, KingSausage. AOA has taken me completely by surprise. After his last few albums (most of which just have standout songs scattered about), I expected AOA to be more of the same: inconsistent and uninspired. We all knew Prince could do better. And let's be honest: we hoped he still had his mojo. He does, by God. This is a strong, cohesive, inspired Prince album. No question!

Personally, I haven't had a Prince album on rotation like this since I can't remember.

AOA: Prince exceeded my expectations like never before; What's your vote?

My vote is: you are absolutely right Sausage.

AOA is an amazing album.


I love every song - all of them, even FunkNRoll has grown for me.

Worst 2 albums of his career.

feeluupp said:

I've said it many times... the key to happiness is having low expectations.

Clouds grew on me pretty quickly. I REALLY like it, the narrative towards the end will probably keep this from being a true classic though.

Whitecaps is awesome.

Wow is the best one for me right now, followed by Anotherlove.

Art official cage was a mess of noise the first 4 or 5 listens, but since I read some commentary and listened closer, I really like it, though it is mostly a "opener" for the album rather than a seperate song (IMO).

UKnow has grown on me as well.

Way back home is good, not feeling it as strong as some people have been saying. Not feeling Time yet. This could be us seems out of place but otherwise decent track, nothing special.

As usual, I am often very underwhelmed with new Prince albums at first. 4 days in, they are really growing strong.

Will they be comercial sucess? probably not.

trax said:

Worst 2 albums of his career.

NPS, 20TEN?????????????????????

It's the first album I listen to from start to finish in a while -- I usually am an inveterate skipper, so I'll usually make an effort once or twice but with this one it's all the tracks in a row since day 2 -- the first I spent skipping the songs I knew.

Aerogram said:

Same here with the no-skipping. Even BCW has grown on me. And who would have thought a song based on a freakin meme would end up being so damn catchy? Like I've said though, listening with a decent pair of headphones on really does AOA justice. Top quality production.

dadeepop said:

Same here with the no-skipping. Even BCW has grown on me. And who would have thought a song based on a freakin meme would end up being so damn catchy? Like I've said though, listening with a decent pair of headphones on really does AOA justice. Top quality production.

i am curious how breakdown sounded to u since i hear a few here talkin like it fuckd up

I'm having a similar moment with AOA that I had with both Musicology and LotusFlow3r. Things since 1996 have been okay. But I'm usually awaiting his albums with a tempered excitement. I enjoy them, but it isn't long after they're released that I'm just throwing the best tracks into he extended playlist.

Musicology was his first (mostly) satisfying pop record since... hell. I don't know. Gold? Emancipation? NPS and Rave are a mess. The High/Peace era tracks are soulless plastic. 2001-2003 were a sometimes-pleasant tangent into jazzy whateverness.

3121 was a bit of a disappointment in that it was overly slick. Planet Earth was okay, but felt very much like a companion piece of leftovers to 3121.

When LotusFlow3r came along, I really wasn't paying much attention to him or the tracks he was teasing. But once I heard it, I got those purple goosebumps again. That was a really satisfying album. I liked MPLSound too, for the most part, but the 2 opening tracks were massive clunkers and it always has a huge hole to dig itself out of by the time they're over. 20TEN is 20TEN. Half of it pretty great moments and the other half nearly unlistenable.

Art Official Age is giving me the feeling that Musicology and Lotus did: an album I can wholeheartedly love without qualms. In fact, I probably have fewer complaints about it than I do either of the other 2. There's no Life O' The Party marring this album and it's got a freshness to it that LotusFlow3r, for all of its musical chops, is missing.

It's an album that I probably wouldn't be embarrassed playing from beginning to end in front of non-fans. Except for possibly the first track? But only because it opens with an eye-roller. It salvages itself quickly.

This feels like an album, rather than the latest 12 tracks he cranked out of the studio and decided to mount on the cover of a CD.

That Plectrum Electrum comes along at the same time to mostly satisfy the rock itch that AOA is missing, despite its many, many flaws -- I wish he could fully committ to a full-fledged rock album. as Prince. where he does all the songs.; he never has in the way that he has made straight-up soul/r&b records.

Overall I'm very pleased. He exceded my expectations. The pre-release singles were okay on their own, but together they add up to a great album and one I'm not ashamed to admit is great for fear of thinking I'm going to think less of it within a year.

Aerogram said:

It's the first album I listen to from start to finish in a while -- I usually am an inveterate skipper, so I'll usually make an effort once or twice but with this one it's all the tracks in a row since day 2 -- the first I spent skipping the songs I knew.

I have been visiting this site for probably the last 15 years on a regular basis but this is the first time I have psoted. I've been a Prince fan for 30 years and seen him 25 times in concert. AOA is Prince's best effort in a long time and as Aerogram stated ... it is an album I can put on and listen to all the way through. The last album I was able to do that with was LotusFlower. Before that TRC and before that TGE. It completley exceeded my expectations and in a way reminds me a little of LoveSexy as one other poster stated. All in all I'm completly satisfied with AOA, so much so that I haven't even had a chance to listen to Plectrumelectrum yet.

It's better than I expected. Actually, much better than I expected.
But, I've stopped listening to it already. 5 slow to mid-tempo songs

in a row, is just too much for me to listen to.

dazedawhile said:

dadeepop said:

Same here with the no-skipping. Even BCW has grown on me. And who would have thought a song based on a freakin meme would end up being so damn catchy? Like I've said though, listening with a decent pair of headphones on really does AOA justice. Top quality production.

i am curious how breakdown sounded to u since i hear a few here talkin like it fuckd up

.

I really like it. I don't understand why some hate it. It's a solid Prince R&B ballad like only he can do. Nice piano, strings, lyrics ("there's a door that you can walk through where there used to be a wall"). I also love where it's situated -- in between Clouds and The Gold Standard. It makes TGS pop even more. And Prince told Arsenio he really liked it, so . . .

Prince shows his inventive side on two new albums

Prince shows his inventive side on two new albums being released simultaneously. (New York Times)

Every few years, some new artist is venerated as the “new” Prince – Bruno Mars being the latest example – and every few years, that artist proves incapable of living up to such hype. Even Michael Jackson, for all of his success, pales in comparison to Prince, who is an extreme talent as an instrumentalist, producer, arranger, sonic provocateur and songwriter. In terms of sheer musical ability and command of the groove, Prince really has few, if any, living peers.

And yet, the guy can’t seem to catch a break, as odd as this might sound. Because of his startling uber-success in the ’80s, nearly everything he has released in the time since is met with a critical sniff and a rolling of the eyes. “Not as good as he once was,” is the mantra, which basically translates as “I want him to be that guy in ‘Purple Rain’ again.”

But not wanting to be that guy in “Purple Rain” again has been a prime motivator for Prince over the decades, as he released albums with fewer and fewer concessions to the mainstream, some of which were brilliant, and all of which were at the very least interesting. For the past decade or so, he has been a bit of an ephemeral presence – popping up to slay us on a televised awards show, or showing up for brief spurts of touring and then fading back into the mythical playground that is his Paisley Park compound in Minneapolis. It was beginning to look like the guy would never release a full album again, preferring instead to parcel his wares out gradually.

But now, as if arriving from nowhere for no particularly tangible reason, we have not one, but two new fully actualized Prince albums. And no, this double-release is not the folly of some rich, cloistered and egomaniacal pop personage badly in need of an editor – think Axl Rose and Guns ‘n’ Roses “Use Your Illusion” I & II – but is rather a representation of twin sides of the man’s estimable gift. “Plectrum Electrum” represents the diminutive inferno’s peerless funk and rock credentials, and is a guitar-heavy affair performed entirely by Prince and the all-female power trio 3rdeyegirl. “Art Official Age” is a bona fide Prince solo album, by contrast, and as such, fulfills its brief by being stylistically all over the place, its conceptual continuity provided solely by the fact that it’s all Prince and it’s all good.

“When life’s a stage/in this brand new age/how do we engage?” ponders the Princely one during “Art Official Cage,” thereby framing the thematic material addressed throughout the “Art Official Age” album, namely the diminishment of genuine human interaction in an era enslaved to technology, and the attendant reduction in our abilities to discern the wheat amongst the chaff. And even if this opening gambit is funky as all get out, it’s not a throw-back to ’80s Prince, preferring instead to turn contemporary EDM on its head, and to marry the “out there” aspects of Radiohead to a far less European groove.

Throughout the balance of “Art Official Age,” it’s easy to trace Prince’s influence on pretty much every pop/R&B star who has come down the turnpike in the post-“Purple Rain” world. You can hear what Justin Timberlake and Bruno Mars are going for when Prince grabs ahold of a ballad like “This Could be Us” or “Breakdown,” but the differences are many, the most prominent being that these tracks are incredibly well-written, and no team of songwriters needed to convene in aid of their composition, as Prince himself is a songwriting army of one.

On the other side of the coin, we have “Plectrum Electrum,” an album that acknowledges the simple and often transcendent pleasures inherent to killer funk grooves and Hendrix-like guitar solos. The album is simply overflowing with both, and yet “Plectrum” sounds like the work of a full-fledged band, one whose front man and songwriter happens to be seemingly incapable of writing songs devoid of memorable hooks. There are no dogs here, no in-studio jams disguised as songs, no throwaways. Drummer Hannah Ford Welton , when she isn’t making for a most convincing Cindy Blackman Santana doppelganger in the drumming department, also handles lead vocals, and rather effectively during the sultry “Stopthistrain.” The tireless and exuberant funk takes a break in acknowledgement of some superb balladry here, most notably during the sensual sway of “Tictactoe,” a song that, during a different age, would’ve been a massive radio smash.

Already, these albums have come under fire from members of the media who, it seems, refuse to forgive Prince for growing older, preferring he stay in the late ’80s forever, dropping pop-funk gems like “Let’s Go Crazy” and “1999” into a world that would have no context for receiving them. Let them gnash their teeth. Meanwhile, Prince is making music that applies to the present day, just as “Purple Rain” made sense in its own milieu. And he remains a startlingly inventive artist.

Local review of new Prince albums.

KingSausage said:

The Breakdown is beautiful. I never thought I'd get used to the lasers, but I did. I've never said that about a song before.

Because in context with the albums these songs shine. I read Prince reference that he was not interesting in hit singles anymore. Maybe that has something to do with it.

A perfectly forgetable album.

r dez nuts any relationship to your king sausage?

please do tell......

I had given up hope of any new Prince album blowing me away and I have to say I was more excited about PE than AOA. HOWEVER.....as previous posts have stated AOA is so cohesive, there is no need to skip songs (something I sadly can't say for PE) and there are, for me, no really awful songs. It really has more than exceeded my expectations. AOA is the best Prince album in a very long time .


Sadly PE has done the opposite, I had high expectations (based on the live shows) and I feel it's just missing something. I do wish Screwdriver was on it but I think it's more than that - the album doesn't have the same cohesiveness as AOA for me. It just sounds like a bunch of seperate songs

Don't like the albums very much as a whole, BUT I do appreciate the direction of AOA. IMO he should have gone all contemporary, not just for a few tracks in order to appeal to a wider range of people.

The new songs heard on Yahoo Live actually do sound very promising. If Prince gets creatively really involved in order to musically expand them - no, a beat is not enough! - than there could be a very interesting era in front of him. More EDGE without compromises!