Looking 4 Myself: Usher's seventh album reboots pop music

The R&B singer is back with his own brand of 'revolutionary pop'.

Usher performs in Dubai Media City.

Usher
Looking 4 Myself
(RCA)
****

Amid all the hype and headlines, it's easy to forget that some of the world's bigger pop stars actually achieved their hallowed status via huge reservoirs of talent, rather than elaborate hats or newsworthy habits. On this seventh studio album, Usher Raymond shows off his full repertoire – well, apart from the dancing – and emphasises his continuing relevance by launching a whole new subgenre: "revolutionary pop". This bold experiment really just involves fusing various existing genres together, but some of the results do make for intriguing listening, after an unpromising beginning.

The album roars into life in the modern urban pop manner with a couple of ear-piercing club tracks that will have many purchasers lurching for the remote and no doubt skipping to the recent single Climax. Produced by the Floridian studio wizard Diplo, it pits Usher's gloriously soaring vocals against a subtle stew of electronic beats, whirrs and gurgles, and the effect is alchemically captivating. It could silence a chatty room.

The title track features an unlikelier guest: Luke Steele, best known as one half of the Australian indie-pop act Empire of the Sun, who this cut was strongly inspired by. Usher's tale of soul-searching doesn't sit entirely comfortably on that 1980s soft-rock keyboard riff, but – like the best of Steele's work – the chorus is wonderfully whistle-friendly.

That's also true of Show Me, but do fast forward past the laboriously lazy lyrics early on ("The night is young; you know we've just begun; let's have some fun; until the moon turns to the sun"), which hopefully was just a last-minute rewrite. Also best avoided is the gratuitous boasting on What Happened to You – "fancy cars, big ol' cribs, platinum on the wall" – but elsewhere Usher's vocal gifts are used to more distinguished effect. The former choirboy's heartfelt falsetto is reminiscent of prime-era Michael Jackson on the ballad Dive, although his similarly romantic sentiments on I Care for U are given a sinister edge by some eerie beats from the Timbaland protege Danja. The production juggernauts The Neptunes provide a jauntier setting for the bouncy fun of Twisted, but more intriguing are two contributions from another new studio collaborator, the Stockholm DJ trio Swedish House Mafia. Numb again rewards patient listeners, building from an uninspiring synth dirge into a jump-up dance floor classic, but the aptly named Euphoria better encapsulates Usher's inclusive new ethos. Futuristic robot-soul leads to laser-guided trance such as the love theme from a ludicrously expensive sci-fi blockbuster, and it closes the album in epic style.

Revolutionary pop, indeed.