Passion, Pain & Demon Slayin' Review

The context matters here more than usual. He checked himself into treatment while the album was being finished and wrote a public letter about it, and the record carries that weight without ever quite shaping it. Structurally it is a return to the first two albums, four acts of hums and heavy reverb, and the best of it is very good. Frequency has the cleanest groove he had found in years.

Baptized and Surfin are the two that stick. By Design is a strange, lovely Pharrell production. The problem is eighty six minutes. Songs repeat their own ideas past the point of trance and into boredom, and the middle act drifts entirely. There is a superb fifty minute album inside this and no version of the man who made it was in a position to find it. Sincere and undisciplined, which describes most of his career after the second one.