Nick Jonas stir-crazy in love; Paul Stanley plants soul kiss
Make room, Paul McCartney, Snow Patrol and Taylor Swift. Add Nick Jonas to the growing list of artists who have made fabulous albums during the pandemic.
Jonas’ 11-track electronic-rich “Spaceman” is an airy and slightly unmoored love letter from a lusty man who is drinking alone, a little crazed and maybe paranoid. “Too drunk and I’m all in my feelings,” he sings in the excellent “2Drunk.” “Should I send that text? Maybe not/ But I miss the sex.”
In other words, we are all Nick Jonas.
The pandemic seems to have scrambled the newlywed, who should have been enjoying his honeymoon period with actor Priyanka Chopra. The unrushed Troye Sivanlike “Don’t Give Up on Us,” the opening track, is alarming coming so soon in a love affair.
Not to worry: “Delicious” is so steamy it should come with a explicit warning. “This Is Heaven” is a more PG love song, sounding like something Lionel Richie would record, complete with an old-school horn solo.
Things get naughty again on the aptly named “Sexual.” His lover “puts the sex in sexual.” In a nice nod to his Indian-born love, he’s included an electric sitar.
“Deeper Love” — which samples from “I Want to Know What Love Is” by Foreigner — might actually remind listeners of an updated version of Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love.” More traditional Jonas-sounding songs are also on the album, like “If I Fall” and “Nervous.”
Jonas co-wrote every track with producer and multi-instrumentalist
Greg Kurstin and the songwriter and singer Mozella. He was separated from Chopra last summer when she filmed in Germany and explored that loss and discomfort.
Jonas has never been more relatable. He, too, likely was watching “The Last Dance” along with all of us, slipping in a reference on the album to “MJ in the playoffs.” His TV is always on. “All my friends are home/ So am I,” he sings.
It all comes together on the title track, which is chilly and brilliant as it captures us all in lockdown, like terrestrial astronauts. “Mask off minute I get home/ All safe now that I’m alone.” Few songs in the past year have better captured the unease and alienation of this past year.
The love guns have all been unloaded and securely holstered, and Detroit is soul city, not rock city, this time out as Paul Stanley, ringleader of the four-ring circus known as Kiss, pays homage to classic soul on a new solo album.
The starry-eyed singer and
guitarist covers some of the greatest soul songs ever written and writes five new tracks very much in that spirit.
It may surprise, if not shock, many Kiss fans. But then, they embraced Peter Criss’ orchestral ballad “Beth,” and didn’t mind (much) when Gene Simmons covered the Disney classic “When You Wish Upon a Star.”
There’s no arena rock to be found here. Crooning and falsetto abounds on the Spinners’ “Could It Be I’m Falling in Love,” the Temptations’ “Just My Imagination” and Smokey Robinson’s “The Tracks of My Tears.”
And not since Barack Obama crooned a few bars of it has there been a more unexpected cover of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.”
Some of Stanley’s originals are quite good as well and would have had a decent chance of being AM radio hits in the ’70s, including “Save Me” and “Whenever You’re Ready.”
Current Kiss drummer Eric Singer is part of the 11-member band of top-notch musicians and singers Stanley has assembled.