For the music reviewer who is also a fan—and most of us are—there are few things more frustrating than a follow-up album that feels like it falls far short of its esteemed predecessor.
On the one hand, you want to say that expectations are irrelevant, a distraction we should ignore. If we’re truly keeping up our part of the bargain as listeners, we should come in fresh every time, ready to hear something new with no preconceptions of what it might (or should) sound like. That would be healthy and wise and virtuous.
But this is the real world—a place where human beings have a stubborn tendency to like what we like and want some more of that. In the real world, audiences inevitably compare new material with whatever they liked most the last time around.
Former Late Show bandleader Jon Batiste’s previous album We Are was a triumphant mélange of New Orleans jazz, soul, funk, gospel, hip-hop and piano-led pop, full of guest shots that further elevated Batiste’s game, in support of a set of songs that felt like a celebration of both life and music itself. It was fun, smart, insightful, danceable and emotional… at times, even magical.
Compared head-to-head with that confident, rangy triumph, World Music Radio comes off as an overcooked, steaming-hot mess.
The album kicks off with a theater-of-the-mind sketch introducing its host, a character named Billy Bob Bo-Bob (no, seriously) who has something to do with the album’s loose, muddy aliens-exploring-world-music concept, though I couldn’t tell you what. From there you get a series of songs interspersed with seemingly random interludes and atmospherics that still fail to distract from the album’s fatal flaw: Batiste has taken the two most grating, obnoxious elements of modern pop music production—programmed beats and distorting vocal filters—and built an entire album around them.
The crime here is that each of the songs on World Music Radio held the potential to be developed into something great; instead, most have been drowned in a bathtub of electronic gimmickry. “Raindance” pairs soul-funk bass with programmed synths and processed vocals; there’s a fun, celebratory song smothered under all the production gloss. “Be Who You Are” takes an enchanting calypso cadence and buries it under cascading waves of synth noise and tweaked-out vocals. “Worship” mixes gospel, rap, and electro-soul flavors in one shapeshifting track that ends up feeling overproduced and scattershot. “My Heart” melds New Orleans nightclub jazz with Spanish melodrama, an intriguing pairing that’s over almost before it begins. And then there’s “Drink Water,” a disjointed electro-soul number that features more of guests Jon Bellion and Fireboy DML than of Batiste, with all three voices processed until they barely sound human.
The brief, hooky “Calling Your Name” offers pleasant bounce and passionate vocals, but the vocal filters and electronic nonsense are endlessly irritating. Why would you do this to your music? When, after another head-scratching interlude, “Butterfly” arrives with just Batiste on piano and unfiltered vocals, it’s like a cleansing breath to wash off all that accumulated electro-goop, a gentle number offering sweet praise for a lover.
Social consciousness shows up on “Uneasy” as Batiste falsettos about the socio-political climate, with synths and programming overwhelming the song lurking inside; when he eventually brings in acoustic piano, the instrument sounds like it’s from an entirely different sonic universe from the rest of the song. “Call Now (504.305.8269)” delivers another overcooked electro-soul number, leading into another non sequitur of an interlude, followed by “Boom For Real,” a tricked-out, funked-up little jam with heavily processed vocals.
We’re all the way to track 15—“Movement 18’ (Heroes)”—before we get to an experiment that actually works, as Batiste riffs on piano under a series of spoken-word voiceovers by Wayne Shorter, Duke Ellington, Quincy Jones and Alvin Batiste, delving into theology, philosophy, psychology and more. Naturally, the next track is an out-of-left-field White Album shuffle, the friendly-yet-somehow-also-menacing “Master Power.” Gospel-tinged “Running Away” is a gentle, piano-centric song of devotion that builds to a satisfying crescendo while succumbing to fewer production flourishes than many other tracks here.
If only that had been true for “White Space,” where Batiste’s beautiful piano playing—a repetitive, rhythmic riff that feels almost hymn-like—is marred by the decision to put his vocals through a filter that makes them sound like they were generated by AI. It’s like putting Groucho glasses on The David; you could, but why would you?
And then you get to the album’s nominal closer, “Wherever You Are”; on my first time through World Music Radio, it was the only song I liked without reservation or qualification, a big, bluesy gospel ballad with splashy drums, no vocal filters, and Persian musician Mehrnam Rastegari playing the otherworldly Kamancheh over the final crescendos. The album’s “bonus” track “Life Lesson” seems to be labeled as that mostly because its production style is noticeably different from the rest of the album; it’s a long, sweet, spare love ballad with Batiste and guest Lana Del Rey dueting over his piano, without a vocal filter or electronic texture in sight.
World Music Radio is an album that appears to revel in its own disjointedness, aspiring to a sort of free-form, boundary-less celebration of creativity—which might have felt good to the artist, but only rarely delivers anything resembling what this audience member was hoping for.
Having said that, this album does have its moments. “Butterfly” is a fluttering flash of beauty, “Movement 18’ (Heroes)” a fascinating construction, “Master Power” a punchy distraction, and “Wherever You Are” a rewarding cross-genre excursion. Finally, ”Life Lesson” is gorgeous in its simplicity. If only that simplicity and directness had bled into the rest of this album, which features a dozen or more guest vocalists, almost every one burdened with filters and auto-tuning that leave you to wonder what their voices actually sound like.
The kitchen-sink approach to arrangement and production taken on World Music Radio obscures the heart of Jon Batiste’s music, and that’s a shame, because the most appealing thing about both the man and his music is his heart. Once the dust settles from this album I hope Batiste can regroup, rein in the gimmicky production, and focus on what got him this far: his humanity.