Publication: Time Out [US]
Date: November 25, 1996
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Title: Time Out Review
Reviewed By: Laura Lee Davies

Emancipation EMI

An album launch beamed by sattelite across the world; top-security access to tracks before release; a continued insistence that the artist's name is a symbol which looks like a piece of cheap gay jewellery and, most significantly, making an album three CDs long when the world has yet to hear a decent, justifiably double album... Things didn't bode well for Prince's first album post Warners, especially as most of what he's recorded this decade has been humpin' pumpin' rubbish, with the very occasional diamond or pearl rising to the surface.

Remarkably then, 's new album is quite the cutey: three hours of funky, soulful, doo-woppy pop and rap grooviness with barely a lyric about what a top shag the bouffanted tich is. Of course, it doesn't need to be three CDs long, even if the stylish production does tighten up the looser extremities. But once you have been through two hours of pleasantly slick Prince-isms ( and the sound here really is more Prince than ) your asthmatic gasps will be too heavy for you to fully enjoy the superior third CD as you lie there in your pool of sweat. Rhythmically harder, lyrically sharper (despite inevitable Prince whimsy about websites etc) and far more consistently hook-laden than the other two albums, disc three sounds much more like an artist refreshed and not just a pop star concentrating that little bit harder in order to prove a point to his old record company.