Tampa Calling

Prince
Lotusflow3r (NPG)
The good news is that Lotusflow3r is the best Prince album since 2004’s Musicology. It’s his most guitar- and rock-oriented in years — perhaps ever — and includes a few songs that deserve consideration for the upper echelon of the Prince canon.

The not-so-good news is that Lotusflow3r is inconsistent and acts as a general reminder that Prince’s genius appears to be a spasmodic proposition. Lotusflow3er, part of a three-CD set sold at retail through an exclusive agreement with Target, is further proof that we’re not likely to get anything like a masterpiece from the mercurial artist again.

Let’s quickly dispense with Lotusflow3r’s sidekicks: Prince’s MPLSound is a collection of mostly brainless dance-funk, only partially redeemed by a couple of seductive soul ballads. Elixer, a Prince-produced disc by the latest of his ingénues, Bria Valente, is destined for the dustbin of R&B divas.

It’s worth noting that the three-disc package costs just $12 at Target, so if Lotusflow3r is the only one worth spending time with, it’s not exactly a rip-off.

The album exhibits Prince’s ongoing facility with cross-genre-ization, which is another way of saying he can still rock out. He’s at his best on Lotusflow3r when channeling his inner Hendrix. “Dreamer” is probably the heaviest rock song he’s ever done, built around a buzzy power-chord riff and an onslaught of Jimi-ish guitar fills shot through with wah-wah. “Boom” is a trippy, mid-tempo rocker with gobs of corrosive guitar. As a change of pace, Prince goes breezy with the charmer “Love Like Jazz.”

But the man just can’t sustain this level of quality. On “$,” Prince pitch-adjusts his voice slightly higher, pushing an already silly song into obnoxiousness. His Big Social Comment number, “Colonized Mind,” is burdened by a dreary sort of pomp. And “77 Beverly Park” is simply a head-scratcher: After beginning with some ominous chords, it devolves into a treacly instrumental fit for the soundtrack to a bad romantic comedy set on the Italian Riviera.

—Eric Snider

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