Soul Curry

But System isn’t a visual album. Like all of Seal’s previous efforts, it’s about Soul. Except, he’s gone dance-floor crazy. Imagine a six-foot-four-inch man, with deep scars, serenading you with, “Living in a dream and I wake up/Wondering where I’m going to. But it’s true, when I wake up, I see you.” It’s like Danny Denzongpa going Dil Toh Pagal Hain. Who says you care about seeing anyone’s face in the dark anyways?

Just Like Before (Rain came down like a melody at your door/Heard it before/Rain in your hair/Cried last night but you couldn’t get out of bed) is Seal at his best on System. A leisurely dance tune that is all about his voice and the emotion — the synth and bass plucks lending it a melancholic tint. Perfect and set for repeated radio play.

Stuart Price (the producer who did Madonna’s Ray of Light and Confessions an a Dancefloor) works with Seal on Loaded and The Right Life. The acoustic guitar work and that accompanies the electro-pop on the latter doesn’t quite gel, especially when the euphoria builds, sounding like a Spanish banjo quartet forced to strum in a Brooklyn-bound metro. The breakdowns — just Seal’s voice or the instrumentation is far better. Loaded, on the other, is focused in its house beats, though unlike previous albums, Seal’s version of Soul is far more apathetic.

That irony won’t be lost on Seal fans. A lot of the writing on System is relationship and settling-down-in-life based, since his wedding to actor Heidi Klum and their children. When Seal slows the pace down, which he finally does on the duet Wedding Day (Klum or Missus Samuel), crooning, “You’re my girl/You’re my angel, throwing in scat and oohing and aahing and whatnot, the result is forced if not entirely artificial. Klum’s voice is electronically treated (perhaps to hide her vocal deficiencies) and really shouldn’t have been here. The title track System rescues Seal from self-indulgence.

Whether the entire album is a repetition of one or several tracks, cloned with tiny variations is what listeners should ask themselves. Perhaps Seal would have done better including more genres of house music, rather than an 11-track franchised version of dance-floor pop.