Consider the plight of Tim “Timbaland” Mosley. You’ve revolutionised modern pop music and are the undisputed best producer on planet earth (if you don’t count an ongoing three-way tie with the Neptunes and a steadily gaining Andre 3000). However, you’re also slightly plain and overweight, with no obvious telegenic charisma nor any particular gifts as an MC – and of course, because life is like that, a solo career is (apparently) what you want more than anything in this world. So with every modernist in-studio impulse you have, with every genre-bending, glistening beat and seriously future-writing noise you make, you’re having to decide: Will I save this for Missy/Justin/whoever and have yet another zeitgeist-smashing worldwide hit (cf ‘Cry Me A River’, ’Work It’ and dozens of others) – or will I have a go myself, and do the metaphoric equivalent of throwing it in the back of the closet and burying it under two weeks’ worth of laundry?
It’s unsurprising then that Timbaland’s third ostensible solo album/collaboration with longtime MCing partner Melvin “Magoo” Barcliff is an odd study of genius and insecurity. These tracks have the feel of aural sketches, notebook jottings, studies for future works – amazing ones, mind, but incomplete – until you realise that, in the main, all that’s missing is a truly singular pop voice out front, to take things somewhere Timbaland’s flat, monochromatic baritone simply cannot. Meanwhile, the almost bashful-sounding Magoo makes you think of teenage sound engineers throwing MC shapes during studio downtime.
Helping Timbaland’s case even less is all the time he spends bragging – either about his preeminence in the world of hip hop (‘Don’t Make Me Take It There’) or about his sexual prowess (the deeply unsexy ‘Leavin’’). Contrasted with the utter confidence of the guest MCs here (Bubba Sparxxx, who effortlessly commands the thrillingly old-school thump of ‘Shenanigans’, or the playful, freewheeling Missy Elliott, who brings fizz and juice to the whirr-and-click of ‘Cop That Shit’), this is the sound of a man who frankly doesn’t have to try at all, trying way too hard. Still: even though Timbaland’s clearly doomed to always be the bridesmaid and never the bride, he remains the hottest ‘bridesmaid’ in pop.