R. Kelly, The Buffet: 'Sex vacations, slurping and social issues are a hard mix to stomach' - album review

There’s no doubt that R Kelly is the sole true heir to Marvin Gaye’s love-god crown, a position secured through single-minded devotion to his mind’s one track. Indeed, it would be interesting to discover just how many of the 462 (!) songs he purportedly wrote for The Buffet were about anything other than sex.

Barely more than a palmful, I’d imagine. Though he does rather lack Gaye’s class and sensitivity: while Marvin might well have recited a suggestive verse such as “The Poem” which opens the album, it’s hard to imagine him concluding it with the most disgusting cunnilingual slurping noise ever committed to disc, as Kelly does here, a sound worthy of a warning sticker all on its own.

However, as the title suggests, this album isn’t about sexual healing, so much as a gourmand indulgence in the gynaecological that leaves romance floundering in the wake of revulsion and/or hilarity. But then, I come from an age before Tinder and Grindr and sexting – perhaps he’s the very earl of romantic elegance by today’s standards.

I doubt it, though. Most of Kelly’s lyrical imagination seems devoted to devising ever more fanciful metaphors for sex, from baseball in “Switch Up” to the tuba and drum of a “Marching Band”, an image which again brings forth guffaws rather than sets the pulse racing – especially when those weedy horn stabs add the most unflattering of musical metaphors.

That track’s delight in noisy congress is echoed later in “Wake Up Everybody” – not McFadden & Whitehead’s politicised call-to-arms, but a request that his lover throw open the windows so the neighbours can hear her screaming; though it does hark back to an earlier era through its pleasing echoes of the snappy, popping bass groove of Patrice Rushen’s “Forget Me Nots”. That same slick feel forms the undercarriage to “Backyard Party”, which surprises one by apparently having no sexual element whatsoever

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Not that one has to wait long for another lascivious entreaty to come along. “Sextime”, which follows, finds the singer urging his lady to let him “take your body on a sex vacation”. In the midst of this lubricious blizzard, however, the track “Wanna Be There” sits as an oasis of relative sincerity.

It’s Kelly’s admission of poor parenting and neglect – what Americans call “issues” – of his daughter Joann, aka Arriraye, for whom it serves as an introductory showcase, as she responds in an appealingly vulnerable, lightly autotuned warble about how she’s prepared to “meet [him] halfway”. For his part, Kelly just wants to “be there when you conquer the world”, which is nice. Probably.

It’s an OK effort overall, but far from Kelly’s best work; and it really goes to pieces in the five bonus tracks of the deluxe edition, which spin off in all directions, from the U2-esque arena-rock of “Barely Breathin’” to the engaging dancehall groove of “I Just Want to Thank You”.

The trickling jazz piano of “Keep Searchin’” finds him in full-on servitude mode, though he even manages to make servitude sound like an assault – you know that whatever she wants to receive, she’ll get exactly what he wants to give, come what may.

Finally, “Sufferin’” and “I Tried” round off the album with a double-dose of self-pity: the former is a rich man’s blues, Kelly lamenting how his Rolls-Royce, his gated residence and his cherrywood furniture can’t compensate for his heartbreak (to which: boo-hoo), while the latter simply illustrates that shameless begging and whining sounds even less persuasive when it’s autotuned. There’s a lesson there, perhaps.