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Mar 18, 2013As a complete package, The 20/20 Experience will surely be remembered as one of the first of what will hopefully become a trend in popular music of releasing challenging, experimental, and expertly written material.
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Mar 15, 2013The main job of pop music--and this is where it so often fails--is making the same old tropes sound fresh, and Timberlake/Timbaland certainly do that here.
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Apr 1, 2013Justin is foremost an entertainer, and as is clear after about three tracks, The 20/20 Experience is hardly a vanity project; the songs are simply good enough that their length becomes an afterthought.
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Mar 12, 2013One of the year's most anticipated pop releases is also one of the genre's weirdest--and most fully realized--efforts in ages.
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Jun 6, 2013This is the kind of record where everyone will have different favorite song, where what someone calls dull or overlong or indulgent will resonate perfectly with someone else, depending on that listener’s past musical tastes and experiences.
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Mar 19, 2013Just like Futuresex before it, this innovative, sonically dazzling album sounds like it was beamed in from several years in the future—2020 sounds about right.
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Mar 18, 2013Frank Ocean might have a gutsier pen game–and Usher more moves and Miguel more sex appeal--but 20/20 is easier to fall into a groove with than any of the best contemporary pop/R&B albums out right now.
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Mar 21, 201320/20 is akin to another recent album that successfully teased-out excitement from satisfaction, Beyoncé's 4.
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May 6, 2013The result would be encyclopedia-thumbing pastiche if it weren’t all so carefully curated, and if the production wasn’t so intricately, lavishly produced that as each track stretches into the fifth or sixth or eighth minute it was not still revealing permutations, secrets, strange little surprises.
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Mar 21, 2013Many of the tracks conclude with two- or three-minute outros, but that's where The 20/20 Experience is often at its best.
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Mar 20, 2013Timberlake and Timbaland (Timbalake?) are at their best when they rely more on organic soul than samples.
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Mar 20, 2013There’s a cornucopia of sounds that definitely needs some time to be digested, but when it finally is--it’s an absolutely satisfying experience.
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Mar 19, 201320/20 succeeds because it’s groove-based, which is to say, it’s neither pop-based nor logic-based.
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Mar 18, 2013The biggest success of The 20/20 Experience lies within Justin Timberlake being able to gracefully glide into Adult Contemporary Music without coming across as trite or cheesy. There is enough oomph for the youngins, yet a defined maturity that proves Timberlake’s overstanding of eventually aging out of the capricious sect of R&B.
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Mar 18, 2013It may not be as mind blowing as FutureSex. But, frankly, what is?
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Mar 18, 2013This Timberlake record may not boast as many rocket-propelled singles as before. But it finds the two Tims going back to the future without so much as a sideways glance at the rave-pop fashion.
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Mar 15, 2013There's nothing too innovative about Timbaland's production, but it's probably as reliable a set of grooves as R&B will spawn this year, custom-tailored to carry the singer's gentle falsetto.
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Mar 15, 2013It’s only once you can give this album a little time and space that you begin to realise that the low-slung 20/20 Experience is really a rather refreshing and assured kind of a sit-down.
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Mar 15, 2013JT has again done a fine job here. The 20/20 Experience shows the pop album isn’t dead.
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Mar 12, 2013The 20/20 Experience is both a return to form and a departure, deftly combining his trademark shape-shifting digital funk with a warmer, more organic sound.
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Apr 17, 2013While it may be a little overlong at nearly an hour and a half, there are influences from 40-odd years of pop music expertly melted together by a master craftsman to create an album of consistently brilliant songs.
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Mar 19, 2013The 20/20 Experience makes a lot of noise while saying very little of consequence. But that noise is the appeal, a luxurious blend of flashy production and pure, unadulterated chutzpah that deepens the hue and tenor of the album, turning it into an exercise in sophisticated sexiness--or perhaps sexy sophistication.
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Mar 18, 201320/20 is a total blast. You have to hand it to Justin Timberlake. Few pop artists have the skill and bravery to make such a stunning mess.
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Mar 15, 2013Timberlake is reminding us that as quickly as music moves today, great style persists.
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Mar 12, 2013His basic sound adheres to the JT formula: golden falsetto, electro-R&B grooves, Motown horns, and other retro glitz that will seduce your mom.
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Mar 22, 2013The 20/20 Experience is an absolutely delicious guilty pleasure.
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Mar 18, 2013Whilst it in no way compares with the leap in ambition we saw between his first two albums, The 20/20 Experience is nonetheless another interesting inter-genre move, this time into alternative R&B and neo-soul.
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Mar 15, 2013The issue is whether he's done enough to quench our R&B-infused pop sensibilities; he hasn't. The needle may have jumped a bit, but ultimately nothing here turns things over.
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Mar 25, 2013The album itself doesn’t quite reach the sharp, perfect coherence that Timberlake was clearly aiming for.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 441 out of 493
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Mixed: 27 out of 493
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Negative: 25 out of 493
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Mar 19, 2013
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Mar 20, 2013
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Mar 19, 2013