“The 20/20 Experience,” Justin Timberlake’s return to pop music after seven years, is triumphant. It’s sleek, smooth and sexy. It flaunts some of music producer Timbaland’s glossiest production to date, and Timberlake’s debonair falsetto spills over with charm and charisma.

It’s also about 20 minutes too long.

Clocking in at about 70 minutes, Timberlake’s latest opus is 10 tracks of blue-eyed soul and self-indulgence. “The 20/20 Experience” is a celebration of lavish excess: a feast of Timberlake’s choicest cuts. It’s a feast that pop fans have long been starving for, but Timberlake and Timbaland might’ve done well to trim the fat before mainstream listeners get obese on the pop star.

Right off the bat, there really isn’t a heck of a lot to complain about on Timberlake’s “20/20 Experience.” It’s head-and-shoulders above any other pop record output this year, and Timberlake earned his spot back on the Top 40 throne.

But even an album as mesmerizing as “20/20” has cracks in its foundation. After all, the only 20/20 vision is hindsight. Right, Justin?

A swirling arrangement of cinematic strings set the tone on opener “Pusher Love Girl,” an eight-minute love affair to the cheap love-as-drugs metaphor. We’ve heard it a million times before, but Timberlake’s elastic voice stretches its way to some flawless retro-soul hooks, and the funky instrumentation and old-school synthesizers keep the idea from getting too stale.

But Timberlake gets a little too comfortable in his own soundscape, and spends about three minutes stretching out the track’s runtime past its expiration date. That’s really the only recurring problem on a record that’s virtually pristine. Lead single “Suit & Tie” is a luxurious, horn-laden tune that probably should’ve cut itself off before Jay-Z cut in for a lame duck of a verse.

Music fans knew that if Timberlake was going to come back into the Top 40 fray, he’d come back swinging. “The 20/20 Experience” runs over with ambition, from the tribal beats of thumping dance floor jam “Don’t Hold the Wall” and “Let the Groove Get In” to the throwback rhythm-and-blues leanings of “That Girl.” But ambition comes in all shapes and sizes — not every track needs to be a rambling seven-minute masterpiece.

Even Timberlake’s best song, “Mirrors,” an early frontrunner for pop song of the year, suffers from fatigue five minutes in. Timberlake belts a monster of a chorus over hand claps and dazzling synthesizers, but the last third of the track is a weird mess of chanted vocals and a beat that sounds like a cellphone stuck on vibrate.

The biggest culprit of overstaying its welcome is closer “Blue Ocean Floor,” a snoozer that drones on for seven and a half minutes. Everything “Mirrors” does right — exuberant vocal performance, high-energy arrangement, killer chorus — “Blue Ocean Floor” scuttles. Timberlake’s voice is only as strong as the instrumentation that backs it, and over a blasé set of sleepy electronics, he struggles to find a half-decent melody.

Still, it’s really the only song worth considering skipping. Everything that made “FutureSex/LoveSounds” an instant classic in 2006 gets blown up to epic proportions on “The 20/20 Experience.” Only Timberlake could sound equal parts charming and self-aware singing about making love on the moon in “Spaceship Coupe,” and “Strawberry Bubblegum” highlights some glitchy beats and jazzy synths.

In an interview with NME, Timberlake asked, “If Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin can do 10-minute songs and Queen can do 10-minute songs, then why can’t we? We’ll figure out the radio edits later.”

Except that’s his biggest problem.

The members of Pink Floyd probably didn’t care if any of their songs charted, and Led Zeppelin wasn’t thinking about chopping down “Stairway to Heaven” to make it more mainstream-friendly. Timberlake got himself stuck between commercialism and art.

“The 20/20 Experience” isn’t quite the modern-day classic JT fans were hoping for, but it came pretty damn close.

Published on March 18, 2013 at 11:30 pm

Contact Erik: ervanrhe@syr.edu | @therealvandyman