Love & Life Review

On paper this is unimpeachable: the pair who invented the sound, back in a room, promising the sequel. In practice it is an hour of a formula being reheated. The loops are recycled from the same seventies crates without the taste that made the first pass work, the interludes are endless, and the record keeps insisting on its own significance while the songs underneath it stay generic. Ooh! is a decent single.

Whenever I Say Your Name, with Method Man, is a pale rewrite of a duet they had already perfected. Love @ 1st Sight has energy. But the writing is where it truly collapses, since the whole point of the original partnership was that she had something desperate to communicate and now she is happily married and reaching for old wounds she has genuinely healed. You can hear her performing a version of herself. Seventeen tracks, almost none of which anyone has revisited, and the one clear misstep in a long and mostly honourable catalogue.