For a producer as young, talented, and lauded as Detroit-reared Jimmy Edgar, releasing two albums within four years—not counting his output as part of Plus Device—is simply not enough. To be fair, Edgar wasn’t focusing on his music, per se, and instead spent the time exhibiting his photography and honing his video work. So, the man keeps busy, but what has the lengthy gap between Color Strip and XXX, his sophomore full-length, yielded those for those of us anxiously awaiting his new album? Exactly what you’d expect.
Essentially, XXX is a mirror image of Edgar’s 2006 debut. He continues to skin ’80s funk, R&B, and electro to tautly stretch over the skeleton of Detroit techno, and his themes remain solely driven by sex. Downright jams like “Hot, Raw, Sex,” “Push,” “Turn You Inside Out,” and “Vibration” are energetic body movers whose chilly synth melodies and skittering beats will surely fill as many dancefloors as bedrooms. Sultry standout “Physical Motion” sounds like it just missed Justin Timberlake’s FutureSex/LoveSounds tracklist, and the instrumental “Rewind, Stop That Tape” could’ve introduced the The-Dream’s latest.
Edgar has soul, even if he masks it under a frigid guise, and yet something’s slightly flat about XXX. The music can sound over-labored in its stylistically austere and hollow production, although when Edgar warms things up and employs a talkbox on “New Touch” and “Midnite Fone Calls,” it does sound slightly less contrived than Chromeo. Regardless, XXX delivers 11 reliably funky, beat-driven, and retro-futuristic songs, and after waiting for years to hear them, that’s not half-bad.
