Xscape

Xscape offers a chance to once again be whisked back to his creative prime and recall the man before his flaws felled him, when he was untouchable.

For the most part, Xscape honors [Jackson's] legacy and should help to relieve some of the mistrust that some may have with those in charge of the icon’s estate.

The songs are all totally enjoyable, even the schmaltzier ones like Loving You, inspiring toe-tapping and appreciation for Jackson’s phenomenal vocals.

There’s nothing here to quite match his finest moments, but nothing stinks and that, I suppose, is the best you can expect.

It has just eight short songs, and the material isn’t about to eclipse “Thriller.” But it does a service by adding worthy songs to Jackson’s canon. Even better, it makes him sound, once again, alive.

Xscape's greatest accomplishment is that these do sound like MJ songs--for better or worse.

Jacko xscaped in a faulty pod, but now at least we’ve a worthy tribute.

It may have taken five years, but Xscape is the posthumous album that does more than reminisce about Jackson’s legacy. It honors it.

Considering what kind of experiment this was, it turned out pretty damn well.

Even with such dark subject matter, though, it's a joy to hear the joy in Jackson's voice.

Timbaland and Reid evoke the Michael Jackson we all love and miss, finding songs that are worthy and giving them arrangements that are simultaneously nostalgic and modern. It's a difficult trick to pull off but they largely succeed, so XSCAPE is a worthy and memorable coda to Jackson's career.

His talent survives in these songs. So does its fatal fracture.

Although rejected by the singer in his lifetime, this is pop, not high art, and it has been handled with considerable care, giving us a glimpse, however illusory, of what this extraordinary talent might actually sound like had he lived.

In the end, Xscape justifies its existence with a handful of potential singles that stand up to Jacko's peerless oeuvre, all of them about love's delirious power.

It's an understandably ad hoc collection that conjures up snatches of wonder from scraps of genius.

Xscape does polish up these old songs, even if it wipes away some of Jackson’s ideas, like the big-band tango Jackson invoked on the demo of “Blue Gangsta.” And Jackson’s voice--deliberately pushed up front in the mixes--is more vivid, and less processed-sounding, than it was on his later albums.... Yet it’s clear why Jackson shelved the songs on Xscape. They’re near misses, either not quite as striking as what he released or lesser examples of ideas he exploited better elsewhere.

Far better to judge the eight tracks here on their own merit, which, for all their inevitable lack of coherence as a set, serve to remind you why Jackson was once pop's premier genius.

While those demo versions were almost entirely incomplete, Jackson at least understood and interacted with those arrangements. Instead, we’re left with a record that is, aside from its opener, best described by the withering adjective “inoffensive.”

It's true that the new versions sound more modern and souped-up than the originals (which you also get if you buy the "deluxe edition" of Xscape), but their producers don't have enough distance from Jackson's presence to reframe his voice the way that, say, Junkie XL's remix of "A Little Less Conversation" reframed Elvis Presley's.

Seventy-five percent of the tracklisting consists of lovingly bastardised fan-favourite versions of demo tracks that have been online for up to eleven years.