Janelle Monáe: The Age of Pleasure review | Alexis Petridis’s album of the week

For over a decade, Janelle Monáe has carved a niche for herself as a purveyor of R&B so high concept that even her album covers came with subtitles. (Purchasers of 2013’s The Electric Lady could take their pick from the standard edition, featuring a cover titled Concerning Cindi and Her Sisters and the Skull of Night Thrashings, or a deluxe version called Concerning Cindi and the Glow of the Drogon’s Eyes.) Equal parts Afrofuturism and the sexually ambiguous personae of 70s Bowie, Monáe’s albums to date posited her as a part-human, part-cyborg figure in a dystopian future. And you couldn’t fault Monáe’s sense of commitment to her roles, which extended to apparently giving interviews in character. But the records sold well rather than spectacularly, spawning hits that slow-burned to gold status without actually making the Top 40.

On her fourth album, however, everything has changed. The high concepts and Afrofuturism appear to have gone out of the window. Rather than a stylised illustration of a heavily coiffed and costumed Monáe complete with a wordy subtitle, the cover of The Age of Pleasure features a blurry snap of the singer topless and underwater, swimming through a succession of people’s legs. It clocks in at a trim 31 minutes, less than half the length of either The Electric Lady or The ArchAndroid, and its songs, interludes and fleeting guest appearances – Grace Jones speaking French; a brief burst of toasting from venerable Jamaican DJ Sister Nancy – segue into each other. And its lyrical focus shifts dramatically from future dystopias to partying and having it off. There are songs named after champagne cocktails, and recordings of Monáe and friends toasting each other as they embark on an evening of bar-hopping. It takes 90 seconds for her to mention Japanese rope bondage and that’s the tone pretty much set: homemade porn, threesomes, demands to “feel a little tongue”, a song apparently about wanking that opens with the attention-grabbing line: “If I could fuck me right here, right now, I would.”

All this is set to rhythms rooted in reggae and dancehall, overlaid with bursts of Afrobeat horns – Fela Kuti’s son Seun and his band Egypt 80 are also among the guests – and atmospheres that recall the laid-back 70s soul of Kool & the Gang’s Summer Madness, or Lowrell’s Mellow Mellow Right On.

It doesn’t always work. There’s something smart and subversive about Monáe using reggae to hymn queer relationships on Lipstick Lover – it is, after all, a genre historically tainted by appalling homophobia – but the track’s perky, poppy lope steers perilously close to Ace of Base territory. When it does work, however, it’s fantastic. Champagne Shit offers dubby vocal effects and a sly rhythmic shift into mid-tempo house; Phenomenal comes infused with a shot of South African amapiano. The album’s highlight is Only Have Eyes 42 which conjures up an enveloping dreamy ambience and borrows the chorus from the Flamingos’ similarly titled doo-wop classic.

Recent profiles of Monáe have made clear that the partying and having it off come with a side-order of earnest stuff about self-acceptance and self-discovery, “actively focusing on being present”, reorienting your life around pleasure, etc. If you question whether pop music necessarily needs earnest justification for being about partying and having it off – given that these things have pretty much been pop music’s main focus for the last 75 years – well, that’s 2023 for you. Either way, it’s an earnestness that sometimes seeps on to The Age of Pleasure itself. The direct lyrical references to personal development are over and done with early on, but there are moments when Monáe’s vocals feel oddly stiff, as if she’s playing another role, or trying a little too hard. The commands she issues during Phenomenal sound less stentorian than wooden; there’s something dead-eyed about the singing on Know Better, or about Paid in Pleasure’s chant of “pleasure, pleasure, pleasure”. It’s an album about hedonistic abandon that occasionally makes hedonistic abandon sound like something challenging a therapist has tasked you to do before next week’s session.

Then again, the album’s brevity means those moments pass quickly, to be supplanted by moments when Monáe sounds as light and warm as the music behind her: singing in an airy high register on The Rush; lushly multi-tracked on Water Slide; rapping – something she’s always been impressively skilled at – on Haute (“They say I look better than David Bowie in a moonage dream”) or Champagne Shit. And at moments like that, The Age of Pleasure’s flaws feel forgivable. If it’s not always the unfettered joy it purports to be, it’s a dramatic pivot unlikely to alienate anyone drawn to the old high-concept Janelle Monáe. Given pop’s current risk-averse climate, that’s an achievement in itself.

This week Alexis listened to

L’Rain – New Year’s Unresolution
Somewhere between abstract dream pop and R&B – like a 2023 take on shoegazing legends AR Kane in house-infused mode, circa 1989’s i – New Year’s Unresolution floats dreamily, anchored by a heavy bass and chattering synth.