Timeless, a grab bag of from-the-vault material that spans decades, feels flat. It's not even all that interesting as a collection of outtakes
Why was Prince the ultimate pop star? Leaving out the outrageous persona, the eye-grabbing iconography, and the sizzling live shows, his musical restlessness and playfulness generated albums that were and are appointment listening. He expanded upon or subverted what had come before, from him and everybody else alike. Prince’s albums played their songs off one another in much the same way those songs’ arrangements did, in spring-loaded patterns with endless buoyancy. An album should be a dynamic experience, and few demonstrated this with Prince’s flair.
There’s almost no dynamism or flair in Timeless, a new collection of old outtakes that plays like it was slapped together in about 15 minutes. It is simply flat, like a club soda left out in the sun. Laid out in chronological order, from 1977 studio demo to 2016 live rendition of a beloved B side, it doesn’t even begin to cohere. Rather than laying out fascinating alternate paths and hints of what might have been, Timeless isn’t even interesting as a collection of outtakes.
Why these songs, you might wonder? Listening to Timeless, the only conceivable answer seems to be “Why not?” The best tracks are a pair of throwaway rockers, 2007’s “The Guilty Ones” (bitchin’ guitar squall) and the original jittery New Wave version of “Tick Tick Bang,” from 1981, which would show up on Graffiti Bridge in 1990 dressed up with off-kilter synth and drum machine. Together, they sound like the seeds of a thematically coherent collection someone should make.
