The ArchAndroid is the long awaited debut album follow-up to singer-songwriter Janelle Monáe`s 2007 debut EP, Metropolis Suite I of IV: The Chase. And it was worth the wait. The music is more complex, the production is fuller, the theatrics even bigger. In short, it is one hell of a debut album.Janelle Monáe has come up with a robotic alter ego named Cyndi Mayweather, and the Metropolis Suites are her story through an oppressive world in which she discovers she is a Messiah-like figure in hopes to free..
This release is hot, pure and simple. It puts me in the mind of hearing Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" album the first time when I was a freshman in college. The songs truly felt like a suite and flowed smack into each other (Erykah Badu's "Mama's Gun" and Jill Scott's live album are the few in recent memory that hit me like this). The arrangements in Archandroid are like an audible collision between Stevie Wonder, James Bond, a tinge of Earth Wind and Fire and Quincy Jones circa Michael Jackson "Off the ..
Surely no human could possibly create such amazing genre-hopping music as this, it could only be an android. And so it is we find Janelle Monáe inspired by 1927 sci-fi movie "Metropolis" creates a cyber soul persona Cindy Mayweather and the result is "ArchAndroid...", a strong contender for album of the year.The lyrics touch on love, war, and slavery, while the sounds range from Classical; the dramatic suite overtures, Indie; "Come alive (The war of the roses)", trippy Rock; the psychedelic Hendrix-channel..
