“ This is out the ordinary/ ‘Cause I miss you, wanna kiss you, and be with you,” he sings on “Out of the Ordinary,” an oddly proper title for a casually indecent song. In fact, most of the album sees Jacquees expressing his feelings and exploring manageable ways to combine companionship and eros. Does it make him a diligent, fair-minded paramour? Yes indeed. Does this make Jacquees a king? Probably not. On Summer Walker-featuring “Superstar,” for example, he claims that he’s the groupie and his lover the luminary, while “Round II” finds him acknowledging that, like everyone else, he’s got shit to do. But Jacquees responds to these altercations with the most generous kind of chill by both widening the limelight to include others and doubling down on his own aspirations to greatness.
Or is it thrones, plural? About midway through opener “King,” Jacquees observes, “ Every day, a star is born/ And if we talking kings, there’s more than one.” The line gestures back to controversial comments Jacquees made on his Instagram in December 2018 when he called himself “the king of R&B right now.” His words didn’t sit well with everyone, especially not with Wendy Williams, Tyrese and Bobby Brown. So even while the album isn’t regal in a grandiose way, it’s still enough to convince listeners that they should watch the R&B throne. Yet Jacquees justifies its longue durée by using its dozen-and-a-half jams to exhibit a consistent, genuine charm that’s all the more impressive for its multiplicity. At 18 tracks, it’s undoubtedly a bit of an endurance test. King of R&B, the latest LP by Decatur-bred R&B star Jacquees, is also quite long.
Impressive releases like Burna Boy’s African Giant, Young Thug’s So Much Fun, Davido’s A Good Time and even Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! all clock in at an hour-plus and feature somewhere between 14 and 19 songs. The second half of 2019 has been kind to the long-ass album.