Da Real World

On her first (brilliant) album, Supa Dupa Fly, Missy Misdemeanor Elliott and her producer, Tim "Timbaland" Mosley, effortlessly mastered the trick of mixing the avant garde with the accessible, in the process giving a welcome injection of energy to American R&B.

Two years on, we find her at something of a creative impasse. Da Real World is still more musically inventive than a lot of albums youíll hear this year, but next to its predecessor, one of the most astonishing records of 1997, it's a crushing disappointment. It is as dark and downbeat as the debut was ultra-vivid and colourful.

For reasons known only to himself, Timbaland (one of the hottest producers in the world of black music) appears to have decided to go classical. Well over half the tracks on Da Real World are musically based on orchestral fanfares and woodwind motifs, all urgent strings and stabbing brass, with Timbaland's usual brand of convulsive percussion - double-time/triple-time/quintuple-time kick drums, ultra-crisp snare shots, spasming showers of hi-hat - acting as a gleaming chrome undercarriage. Sounds enticing on paper, maybe, but over 69 minutes the formula wears thin real quick.

One song uses a staccato woodwind "riff" from Holst's The Planets; another, if I'm not mistaken, lifts a sample of something by Schubert; yet another one is based on a portion of what sounds like Wagner's Der Ring Des Nibelungen. While the thought of a hot US R&B producer scouring old Deutsche Grammophon records for new ideas is an amusing one, it's just as well for Elliott and Timbaland that all these people are dead and consequently can't sue them.

Timbaland's approach is unforgivably lazy. Swiss sample-sorcerers The Young Gods, for instance, used classical music on their early releases, but utilised it as a flavouring rather than the main course, taking one tiny facet of a symphony or concerto - a snippet of stabbing violin here, the intro of a thunderous fanfare there - and manipulating it into something new, reversing it backwards, turning it inside out. By contrast, Timbaland is content to just let the motif play itself and then endlessly loop it over and over again - at the expense of the heavily sample-based funky stuff that dominated the first album.

Yet, sparing though he may be with his creativity, Timbaland still has more tricks up his sleeve than 99% of R&B producers. All his aural trademarks are scattered throughout the album: voices treated and faded in from corners of your speakers you hardly knew existed, careful manipulation of spooked and eerie sound-loops, beats that sound like someone playing the spoons while using bones instead of cutlery. The tracks that diverge from the formula described above ('Stickin" Chickens', 'Hot Boyz', and the fantastic single 'She's A Bitch') are the best ones on the whole album.

Lyrically, we're in familiar territory, with Elliott trading snappy one-liners with a bewildering array of special guests (of whom MC Solaar and Eminem are the most well-known names); indulging in the now-familiar commodity fetishism beloved of nearly all American swingbeat acts ("Y'all be driving Lexus Jeeps and Jaguars, and the Bentleys and Rolls Royces, playin' hard ball with the platinum Visa, 'Hot Boyz"); and spending the rest of the time thinking up new ways of saying "I'm great, other rappers are rubbish".

I'm not sure whether she should be more worried about her own self-plagiarism or Timbaland's lack of new ideas. Either she needs a new producer, or he needs some new records in his library - preferably ones without any dead German composers on them.