The Time – Pandemonium

Most excellent review. The 2011 album Condensate album under the Original 7ven moniker was much closer to catching the original groups "The Time" signature sound.

Being that this was the first "Time" album to follow the 'pandemonium' surrounding "Purple Rain" ("Ice Cream Castles" came out in 1984 during the "Purple Rain" era) a long six years earlier, there were very high expectations for this album to do well. Problem wasn't a lack of talent --- even Morris Day's 'persona' still worked with the new material --- the problem was too much talent. When last we saw The Time together they were considered one of the best live acts in the country, even prior to "Purple Rain." The film, while making their characters out to be the arch nemeses of The Kid (Prince), allowed them to show off their talent and the ' individual careers took off. Morris Day had a couple of albums that were hits... Jellybean Johnson and Monte Moir started successful careers producing and mixing other artists... St. Paul co-lead the band The Family... Jesse Johnson had an incredibly successful career with his first three albums, both with and without his "Revue"... and of course Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis went on to, well, become Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, producing more hits than you can count.

Point being, after six years of separate individual successes, when The Time got back together again, they weren't The Time. "Jerk Out," the lead single and easily best track on the album of course featured Day on lead vocals, but the remaining elements of the song - what were part of one complete unit before, were separate and distinct elements, i.e. Jesse Johnson's way too short guitar solo. The remaining tracks on the album, with the exception of "Chocolate" and "Donald Trump (Black Version)" are three to five minute snapshots of a band trying to find that intangible X factor they used to have as a group, but realizing that the X factor they had was really with a lowercase 'x' compared to the uppercase 'X-factors' in that each member had realized they had in themselves and grown into on their own.