Victoria Beckham's leaked 2003 17-track R&B album ‘Come Together’, reviewed
A shoddy, but surprisingly fun nostalgia trip
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Your support makes all the difference.A bunch of demos Victoria Beckham cut in 2003 with Roc-A-Fell co-founder Damon Dash, all unfinished but to varying degrees, found their way online this week.
The temptation is of course to cry "lol, what is Victoria Beckham doing making songs with M.O.P. and she definitely can’t sing’, but if you take the album/demo/.zip file for what it is there are actually some pleasantly nostalgic and morishly light and superficial moments on there. Conceal the singer’s identity and slap some throwback artwork on there, and you could almost pass it off as a carefully curated piece of early 2000s periodisation not dissimilar to the PC Music movement.
‘DAT Simple’ starts with a crunchy, screw-your-face-up intro that is an immediate head nodder, while ‘Baby Boy’ (Hard Version, skip the Soft Version) has definite Aaliyah-lite vibes, containing a candy floss cloud of a chorus and just begging to get a 2016-style remix with perfectly metronomic h-hats.
Don’t get me wrong, the vocals are abominable. Her voice has the personality of an all-purpose cloth and the lyrics include the simultaneously outdated and surreal: ‘More than fire / He is my provider’ - not that this matters, the raw vocal feeds simply need a good dose of autotune and kind of work in their hollowness.
Full playlist below:
‘Let Your Head Go’ is a departure from the clear “let’s try and copy Aaliyah/Ashanti” mission statement, being more dance-orientated and having more in common with something like Madonna’s ’Ray of Light’. ‘That Dude’ meanwhile is so irresistibly/unbearably catchy it sounds like a jingle that might play over the crossfade between two scenes in a sitcom.
By the end of the 17 tracks I'm pretty exhaustied (maybe two or three could have realistically made the cut), but I do briefly feel transported to a time when Calippos were still readily available, and that’s nice.
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