Jamie Lidell | Jim

Album Most Likely To: dominate your mom’s Discman while she’s doing Jazzercise. In a cool way.

If you were to hear Jamie Lidell’s new gospel-soullicious album with no backstory whatsover, you’d only have roughly a third of the story. You might imagine he’d be good on Oprah.

Alright, here’s how it goes:

A decade of cerebral workouts, synths, and the experimentations of “science-funk” lead a finicky musical brainiac to let loose, all his energy exploding into a burst of relief with warm, happy-day Motown soul numbers and Stevie Wonder singalongs. As his bio says, it’s all about the hook in this ”soundtrack of sunshine.” It’s all about the fun. His lyrics gush about “letting off some steam,” and “getting this out of my system.” Your mom will love this shit, and fans will find it deliriously refreshing.

I’ll ignore his slight misuse of the term “schizophrenic” to give you this Jamie quote: “With Jim, I’ve put the brackets around my schizophrenic outpourings.” The idea is that this is a new Jamie; this is “Jim.” Jim is an entirely different person, and an entirely different animal (I think he means multiple personality disorder instead of schizophrenia. I could be wrong).

At any rate, the success of the pastiche and the level of commitment are awe-inspiring, and it feels good, too.