Guy: Guy III : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Producers of big-money black music as skilled as Teddy Riley create self-destruction engines: Their sounds get copied worldwide, and then they disappear in a field of beat biters. But Riley is back in the game with Guy, his late-Eighties group, which defined the sophisticated New Jack Swing style. Guy III is an act not just of caprice but of divine right. "We're back," Riley intones on the opening track. "And guess who brought us back? It's God. And you." The question is the grown-up band's new mission on earth. New Jack Swing is music from a less complicated time; Guy can't go near that style. So, as young jazz musicians often do when they reach maturity, Riley has left behind personal innovation; he's more interested in refinement of the greater tradition. Guy III is a valentine to the R&B charts of the Eighties and Nineties: the lean, sharp robot beats of Timbaland, Zapp's electro bounce with a talk box, plush love jams, Stevie Wonder's slow synth fantasias. Aaron Hall's manly voice is still pretty dazzling; in "Why You Wanna Keep Me From My Baby," written to a real-life ex-girlfriend who has custody of his child, his singing bubbles over with the righteousness of the wronged. But sophisticated mixtures of R&B and hip-hop are everywhere now, as they weren't in 1988, and today Guy's old-school slickness seems just a curiosity. (RS 834)

BEN RATLIFF