You may not know it, but you’ve heard Keri Hilson before. Sure, “In a Perfect World” may be the 26-year-old R&B singer’s debut album, but it’s far from her first contribution to the pop charts. Remember a little Britney song called “Gimme More”? Hilson wrote that one. Remember Timbaland’s “The Way I Are”? That was Hilson singing the killer chorus. And if you saw the video to Usher’s blockbusting “Love in this Club,” you might recall the drop-dead stunner who’s got the singer buckling at the knees — well, that was her too.
Hilson’s hardly a newcomer to the music scene, then. She’s spent five years filling her phonebook with the biggest names in pop, and it shows on her long-delayed debut, for better and for worse. Yes, it’s a state-of-the-art pop record, glossy and slick and jam-packed with hooks. But it’s also the kind of album that will look desperately dated five years down the road, as it panders to all of contemporary pop’s worst tendencies. Excessive auto-tune? Check. By-the-numbers Timbaland productions? Check. Token appearance by Lil Wayne? You bet.
So while “In a Perfect World” is a highly accomplished record, it’s also a startlingly anonymous one, teeming with all the little bleeps and stutters that have come to define pop music in 2009. Sometimes it sounds like Hilson is simply plucking songs off the charts and reassembling them, hoping listeners won’t notice.
Then again, one can’t really blame her. It’s true that Hilson’s got writing credits on almost every song here, but her name is lost amid an avalanche of mixers, producers and guest vocalists. Like every other mainstream pop album these days, it seems the name on the cover is almost irrelevant to the music inside. Producers, not singers, choose the sound now; on her debut, even a major talent like Hilson is sidelined by the egos around her.
Take a glance at the album art and you get the impression that Hilson is a forceful and independent woman, venturing into her solo career without anyone’s help. But read the liner notes carefully, and you realize there are only two names here that matter: Timbaland and Polow da Don.
Both producers helped Hilson jump-start her career, and both are enormously influential figures in the contemporary pop landscape. Timbaland largely defined the sound of pop in 2007, with songs like “Apologize” and “SexyBack,” and Polow da Don did the same for 2008, with “Love in this Club” and “Forever.” It’s these producers’ ubiquitous styles that define Hilson’s debut, leaving the supposed star of the show sounding like any other debuting R&B singer — a pretty voice for her producers to play with.
This is particularly noticeable on the Timbaland-produced songs, in which Hilson’s virtually indistinguishable from the legion of other R&B singers the producer has worked with in the past. It doesn’t help that many of Timbaland’s contributions to the album come across like remixed versions of his earlier hits.
On “How Does It Feel,” for instance, Timbaland essentially recycles Madonna’s “4 Minutes,” reusing that song’s clattering drum-work as well as its marching-band horn hits. “Return the Favor” is even more shamelessly reprocessed, living up to its cynical name by regurgitating Timbaland and Hilson’s previous collaboration on “The Way I Are.” Five years ago, a song like this would have sounded extraordinarily avant-garde. Now it just sounds boring as hell.
Polow da Don, the album’s other major creative force, fares a little better. His “Turnin’ Me On” is the album’s big single and easily its best song — an infectious slice of techno-funk whose only concession to formula is the “feat. Lil Wayne” tagged onto the end. The producer’s other tracks are less impressive, though. “Make Love” flounders in a sea of lovey-dovey cliches and over-the-top production effects, despite a strong vocal performance from Hilson. Even worse is “Get Your Money Up,” an auto-tune-heavy club track that’s just as obnoxiously superficial as its name.
The rest of the album is handled by a variety of up-and-coming producers, and the results veer from extraordinarily bland — the Akon-featuring “Change Me” — to actually quite good. “Slow Dance,” co-written by Justin Timberlake, is one of the album’s strongest moments, a deliciously sensual come-on that sounds like Donna Summer projected into the year 3000. It’s lucky that Timberlake doesn’t get anywhere near the mike on this one, because “Slow Dance” is one of the few songs in which Hilson isn’t overshadowed by her collaborators. The singer inhabits the track’s salacious, synthetic groove and makes it entirely her own.
Quite the opposite happens on “Knock You Down,” an over-the-top pop production where guests Ne-Yo and Kanye West mercilessly sideline Hilson. The singer has claimed her debut is about female empowerment; it’s ironic then that one of the album’s most memorable songs comes off like R&B superhero music, with the two male singers trading lines like “I used to be commander-in-chief of my pimp ship flying high” along with hilariously tasteless references to domestic abuse.
“Knock You Down” is easily one of the album’s best songs, blessed with a sense of fun that’s sorely missing from the rest of “In a Perfect World.” But caught in the midst of all the chauvinistic braggadocio, Hilson sounds like nothing more than a glorified backing vocalist. To say she’s playing third fiddle here would be a compliment — and surely that’s not what the singer wanted on the fourth song of her debut album.
Like its shiny neon cover, “In a Perfect World” is all surface, no substance. If what you want from a pop album is to listen to it once and throw it away, then Hilson’s debut is pretty much the perfect buy: You’ll be hard-pressed to find a more glossily produced record this year. But after two or three listens, the laziness of the songwriting and the vacuity of the production work become glaringly apparent. This is pop-by-numbers, designed to climb charts and nothing more. Clearly, Hilson has spent too much time hanging around pop producers, and on her full-length debut, she struggles to assert herself amid the din of industry egos — maybe she should stick to singing choruses.
Pros: A handful of strong songs, particularly the slinky, minimalist “Turnin’ Me On.”
Cons: Generic, fancy production that obscures Hilson’s personality.
2 paws
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