Seeing Sounds suggests they're still having problems. They try distorted 70s rock riffs over pungent drum'n' bass and crunk shouting. They try straightforward new-wave pop on Happy. They try employing the Hives: while it's nice to see the Swedish garage rockers' latterday career as muses to the world's greatest urban producers continuing bafflingly apace (they also turned up on Timbaland's last album) their contributions to Windows seem oddly anaemic. Not all the ideas are unsuccessful: Kill Joey has a great 70s cop-show chase riff, Everybody Nose's attempt to transpose rock dynamics on to rattling breakbeats and acidic synth squelch is appealingly propulsive. But even the best tracks are marked by a sense of something lacking, usually a decent song. On the rare occasions when they fetch up with a memorable tune - amid the descending soft-rock chords and thick harmonies of Sooner Or Later, for example - they cling desperately to it for six and half minutes, smothering it with extended codas and widdly guitar solos.
Lyrically, Fly Or Die rather cravenly courted the angsty teenage market. It didn't really work - there's something deeply odd about hearing a 34-year-old multi-millionaire (taking time between squiring Jade Jagger and launching his own jewellery range for Louis Vuitton) trying to convince the globe's adolescent goths that he feels their misery. Seeing Sounds holds back on that kind of thing. Instead, the lyrics are largely about sex. Occasionally, this is diverting: "Nobody make me come like you," offers You Know What, a funny thing for a bloke to sing, implying as it does that she makes it shoot out of his ears or something. But it does get wearisome. The single Everybody Nose putatively tackles the issue of cocaine abuse, but it swiftly becomes apparent that Williams' objections to the drug have less to do with say, the trail of death and environmental devastation wrought by its production, than the fact that a girl with a nosefull is more likely to be interested in dancing or gabbling on than fulfilling her life's destiny, which should be having it away with Pharrell Williams. It has one of those odd introductions that rappers go in for, where they mutter their name a couple of times, say "yeah ... uh huh", then offer a pre-emptive summary of the track's nonpareil qualities: "It takes a lot of courage to say this." It's hard not to feel this is pitching it a bit high: under what circumstances does it take a lot of courage to say that people on cocaine are a pain in the arse? During a night in with the Primrose Hill set? At a meeting of the Norte del Valle Cartel?
You leave Seeing Sounds convinced that Williams and Hugo are no closer to their dream of inventing a successful R&B/rock hybrid. And if producers as talented as this can't do it, then who can? Certainly not their rival Timbaland, whose recent efforts in this direction have been equally underwhelming. It's a hugely appealing idea, but maybe it just can't be done. Perhaps it's time for N*E*R*D to take a leaf out of Mrs Clinton's book and finally concede defeat.
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