Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By Justin Bieber, Universal Music 2021.
I must be honest and say that I’ve never really been a Justin Bieber fan.
It’s partly a generational thing but mostly because I don’t respond to his work as being genuine and that feeling has been reinforced by this album.
It opens with an audio snippet from Dr Martin Luther king about justice but despite revisiting this theme with another extended audio snippet about halfway through the album I couldn’t detect any other references in the songs to one of the most pressing social and economic issues facing the world today.
This left me wondering why he misappropriated the words of one of the most prominent campaigners for equality and justice that the world has seen, other than as an advertising gimmick.
The second extract from Martin Luther King questions what principle we’d be prepared to die for.
It is followed by a track Die For You which you’d think would build on or address the issues raised in the speech, instead Bieber presents a love song.
It seems to me that Justin Bieber was not prepared to let his songs stand or die on their own terms, so he laid a thin veneer of earnestness over the top in an attempt to make them something that they’re not.
This is not an album about justice, it’s just a pop album about the usual preoccupations of pop songs and it works well on those grounds.
It doesn’t need to pretend to be something that it’s not.
Now that the criticism is out of the way, let me say that I think this album is probably the most enjoyable one that I’ve heard from him.
Justin has crafted a good pop album that ventures into territory that he hasn’t visited before.
Along with his trademark ballads he dabbles in pop/rock with Die For You and there are some interesting combinations where a song starts as a ballad, Hold On for example, before morphing into a beat pop piece built around a great bass line.
Ghost goes through many changes from a sort of light garage rock and then it builds to a stadium sound built around a power hook before settling as an acoustic folk piece.
This is achieved with great skill and experience and shows how much Justin Bieber has developed as a songwriter.
I just wish he’d let the songs do the talking. Justice is a good pop album, nothing more and nothing less.
