(At least the crummy parts of Kelly's older albums had a misguided messianic ambition behind them.) The cheap faux-orchestrations are back, too, and they sound especially shabby backing the total conviction of Kelly's engaged vocal performances. Kelly seems to have breezed through the writing and recording process here, and there's a fine line between breezy and half-assed. Kelly was a good look, especially since enough of his irrepressible weirdness is always going to shine through and keep things from feeling too buttoned-up.īut the care, craft and subtlety of Love Letter is audible only in flashes on Write Me Back. A more restrained, classicist, and focused R. By that, I don't mean he should have returned to the maniacal story-songs he drove into the ground after "Trapped in the Closet", cranked up the sex metaphors to an even more deranged degree, or gone cherry-picking the hottest new sounds. The problem with Write Me Back is that it doesn't go far enough.
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