Album Review: Justin Timberlake’s "Man of the Woods" Contains the Worst Music of His Career

Justin Timberlake is over.

He may not be over forever. There’s always the chance he’ll host Saturday Night Live again and pull Andy Samberg out of retirement for a new collaboration. (Those are great!) And he may still deliver his first convincing film performance after years of threatening it. (Fingers crossed, pal! Is In Time 2 on the cards?)

But, as of February 2018, it’s over for JT. Technically, it was over mid-2016, when he released the interminable, inescapable "Can’t Stop This Feeling" from the Trolls soundtrack. It seemed with that he had officially become the Jimmy Fallon of pop: Basically, just for babies now.

"Can’t Stop This Feeling" was the canary in his musical mine. There’s nothing quite like it on his newie, Man of the Woods (his first LP since dropping two in 2013), which is an attempt to paint himself simultaneously as a mature/settled father/lumberjack and a figure of partying fun.

There’s also nothing on it you would generously qualify as good, or listenable. Maybe you’d be able to stand one or two tracks, if they were being played over a supermarket’s loudspeaker and you were preoccupied trying to navigate the cereal aisle. But that’s almost exclusively the scenario in which you wouldn’t be actively annoyed by Man of the Woods. At home? A club? While waiting at the checkout? I pray for your ears.

That the mass cancelling of Justin Timberlake should coincide with his highest-profile performance to date—at the Super Bowl, without Janet Jackson, who I hope is enjoying some much deserved karmic laughter right about now—is probably not the kind of juxtaposition he was hoping for when he decided to merge his passions of ‘country’ and ‘funk’. And yet, it is the only appropriate proportional response to such a terroristic act as a "country-funk" album. At the Super Bowl, he also paid tribute to Prince, who would have been sick into his purple blouse if he had been alive to hear this.

On Man of the Woods, every song is in competition to be worse than the one before it, and every song wins. Even opener "Filthy" seems to challenge his previous rebranding moment, "Sexyback", with its zigging laser sounds and his intercutting purrs. No one has ever accused Timberlake of being some kind of lyrical savant, yet he keeps hitting new lows across this record, like Homer Simpson continually falling through floorboards. On "Filthy", he asks the musical question, "What you gonna do with all that meat?" He follows it up with "Midnight Summer Jam" and "Sauce". They made my breakfast repeat on me.

"Sauce" might be the worst offender, with the lyric, "I love your pink, you like my purple," recited over cascading electric guitars. Somewhere, Lenny Kravitz is crying. Then again, "Supplies", which is about sex during civil unrest, has another eye-watering line: "I’ll be the wood when you need heat." This just in: There were no survivors.

There is, however, an added live performance element to the music, likely inspired by his touring band, the Tennessee Kids. You can hear their influence (occasionally) in "Filthy", on which JT is otherwise buried in the mix, and which came accompanied with a "sexy Steve Jobs" video, to demonstrate how far his finger was from the cultural pulse. Elsewhere though, Justin goes it alone, pulling out the guitar to strum soulful odes to his wife, Jessica Biel, their son, Silas, and, umm, flannel, the literal clothing material.

To be honest, I would have assumed flannel—yes, the inanimate fabric—had a writing credit here too, given how Timberlake has fallen victim to the "going back to my country roots" plague of our time. Miley Cyrus at least has the lineage to pull off a country album. And Lady Gaga has the pipes. Timberlake, on the other hand, collaborating with his usually reliable producers (The Neptunes and Timbaland), cannot convincingly sell the sincerity (certainly not on the absurd "Livin’ Off the Land").

Country star Chris Stapleton boasts three writing credits, and gets a featured duet on "Say Something", a tune that is hilariously about absolutely nothing. Only "Montana", which echoes the Bee Gees (by way of Daft Punk’s recent plundering of their back catalogue on Random Access Memories) has a consistently appealing groove. (It took 711 words, but I did find a compliment.)

To top it all off, Man of the Woods is 65 minutes long. It’s not only that this thing is terrible—the absolute nadir of Timberlake’s entire musical career—it’s that there’s just so much of it. He’s bringing hefty back.

1.5/5

Man of the Woods is now available.