@ Tim F: "Summer Love" is actually pretty decent, not amazing, but a perfectly catchy tune with excellent bass kicks and nice little synth bass fills... but pretty much this is an album with three great tracks, (Futuresex, Sexyback, My Love-and its prologue) a handful of adequate tracks (Sexy Ladies, Love Stoned, Damn Girl, Summer Love) and then a bunch of uncomfortable ballads which would work a hell of a lot better if the strings sounded either less or more artificial, (they're obviously real, expensively recorded but without any grain or texture in them- it would be better if they were synthetic really), but utterly lifeless and way too high in the mix, suffocating the life out of the beats which are amongst the best on the record (What Goes Around for example). Its a similar story with the way Timba's recorded the non-funk guitars on the album, they just sound wrong, in a non-interesting way. But it IS almost a great album. That's what makes it so frustrating! Timberlake is a fantastic pop-star, silly and plastic and straight faced in all the right ways, and Timberland is, well, Timberland. But at times it is a pretentious (in the literal meaning of the term) piece of work, its ambitions outstripping its abilities.
Incidentally those female sounding backing vocals that come in half way thru "My Love"- incredibly beautiful and haunting, almost theremin/ondes martenot like...