Abundance

Long Play Record

Label: Ubiquity Recordings

Abundance

UPC: 780661123910

Release Date: 01/20/2009

Original Release Date: 01/20/2009

Andy Kellman

With Triple P three and a half years in the past, Waajeed and Saadiq condense their name from Platinum Pied Pipers to PPP and transform just about everything else, from their associates to their sound. Abundance is no downtempo left-field R&B affair. It's not the type of album you can either absorb or allow to fade into the background. There's no choice here; the songs confront the ears, yet there's no discord, only an immediate connection to the pleasure receptors. Joined by a completely different roster of vocal and songwriting collaborators -- primarily Coultrain and Karma Stewart, but also involving Jamila Raegan and Neco Redd, as well as several instrumentalists (drums, guitar, strings, horns) and one assist from abstract hip-hop producer Dabrye -- the crew orchestrates a walloping set that, while firmly rooted in R&B throughout, takes a bracing turn with each track. It's a product of the studio, but it must have been constructed with full-band live performance in mind, where there are no lulls in energy, from the tracks with bounding dance beats and call-and-response vocals to the ballads with exquisitely detailed arrangements. Even with the knowledge that Waajeed's ghost productions have been circulating throughout the upper end of the industry, it's startling to hear songs as large, direct, and sleek as "Luv Affair" and "Go, Go, Go," a back-to-back pair that would not be out of place within the last half of Diddy's Press Play or any other album involving productions from Timbaland and Danja. "Go, Go, Go," in fact, could be fronted by Britney Spears, but it would lose the emotional grit. And it's that grit, combined with ambition-fueled passion and a palpable sense of "in a zone" energy, that ties all of these songs -- the alternate-reality pop hits laced with gleaming synths, the song-oriented house tracks, the tasteful "grown folks"-styled moments, and everything in-between. The album's lead single, released months before the album, was the dynamite '60s throwback "On a Cloud," indicating that PPP could have done a full-length genre exercize to rival Amy Winehouse's Back to Black or Raphael Saadiq's The Way I See It. Instead, it's just one piece of a multi-dimensional album with no misfires. ~ Andy Kellman, Rovi