JUSTIN'S NEW, "MORE MATURE" SOUND
Justin Bieber played the press an exclusive preview of his R&B and dance-infused album Believe last night, and we were there to wrap our ears around it for you.
Leaning on the shoulder of his manager Scooter Braun, who was choosing which songs to play on Supperclub’s godawful sound-system from his laptop, Justin argued with the first choice of Boyfriend, as “they’ve already heard that,” but we heard it again anyway, as he sat back in his chair swigging from a huge bottle of water – before stopping the track halfway through as the sound was “so bad.”
“This sounds so bad. My song is good – but this sound… can we stop?”
Fair play to him, those speakers would’ve made Celine Dion sound like a death metal group, so he chatted away to Reggie Yates while we waited for the sound to be fixed.
The second song was the stripped back Die In Your Arms, which fans of Justin’s pop stuff will love, as it really shows off his vocals.
“It’s got an old school vibe,” said Justin. “It’s all new and old at the same time.”
Profound. A syrupy sweet slow number, Justin gently croons out “Every time you touch me I just die in your arms, it feels so right,” across a love ballad Bruno Mars will definitely be jealous of, along with Justin’s naked voice and an acoustic guitar on Be Alright.
Bieber teamed up with Ludacris for the up-tempo All Around The World – which he was clearly excited about, mouthing along to all the words and doing a huge clap when the chorus kicked in (“All around the world, people want to be loved, all around the world, they’re no different to us”)
“The quality is so bad, this sounds so bad,” Biebs said again. Which was true.
“We’re just gonna play anyway, but my record sounds better than that.”
There goes any more business from Universal at the Supperclub then. Whoops.
Right Here, Bieber’s collaboration with Drake, is set to be huge. “It’s got a really cool vibe to it,” The Biebs promised us before we heard a snipped of the track without Drake’s vocals added to it yet.
From the beginning it sounds like Justin covering a Drake song, until he does some vocal gymnastics and brings it back to Bieber again. We can’t wait to hear the finished version.
A definite summer anthem for Beliebers comes with Thought Of You, which Justin himself started furiously air-drumming along to as the intro burst into the room. He hits some impossibly high notes singing “I’m just in love with the thought of you, and everything that you do” in the chorus, and scrunched up his eyes and sang along to the Disney-montage-soundalike from his armchair.
“I worked with Timbaland, Drake, Kanye and Taylor Swift on this record,” he told us.
"You think it wouldn’t make send to have Drake and Taylor Swift on the same album, but the songs, with my voice – they all make sense. “It was just so cool to be able to do different kinds of styles.”
He also shrugged off any comparisons with Justin Timberlake.
“My voice sounds nothing like Justin Timberlake," he said. "If it did it wouldn’t be a bad thing, he’s very talented.
“I think people get that impression because he does a lot of falsetto, and I happened to do falsetto on Boyfriend, so that’s where they got the… stuff.”
Stepping it up again is a big, thumping track As Long as You Love Me “that’s probably gonna sound like crap through these speakers because it’s got a lot of bass.” It’s a dance / electronic track with tumbling beats, that wouldn’t have been too out of place on Britney’s Femme Fatale album. If Justin was a femme. Obvs.
The most powerful track on the album is the title track, Believe, which Justin wrote “for all my fans. If you listen to the words, it’s about how they inspire me – so play it Scooty!” The song’s an uplifting ballad with a gospel back-up during the chorus; ‘Everything starts from something / something would be nothing / nothing if your heart didn’t dream / where would I be / if you didn’t believe.’
“This means a lot to me,” Justin went on. “I was writing it on my birthday when the clock turned 12. Scooter came in and was like ‘Let’s go sing Happy Birthday to you!’ and I was like, ‘No, let me finish the song.’”
In a nutshell, fans of Justin’s previous albums won’t be disappointed with Believe – there’s still a lot of the ‘old Justin’ in there, but enough of his new sound to convert some of the unconvinced to Justin Bieber 3.0.
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