Island
Pop, 2016

Everyone’s favorite gay-baiting reedy-voiced himbo Nick Jonas is back, and he wants everyone to know that Last Year Was Complicated. Perhaps that was a reference to his musical puberty, and this album is a bit more sexual and adult in nature. Not too much, of course, as teenage girls are still paying a big part of his bills. He may need them more than ever, when the gay fans get tired of him never showing pee-pee or following through in any other way his constant “You never know…” teasing act.

Alas, there is nothing here that stands out instantly like Jealous from his previous self-titled album. Close is a pretty good track, but Tove Lo is the one doing all the heavy-duty work here; whenever she’s singing, poor Mr Jonas sounds like he’s just playing the back-up vocalist. Under You sounds like a really bad early Usher-wannabe song, with cringe-inducing lines like: “So I’ll never get over not getting under you.”  Basically, he wants to have sex with you, the listener, and he wants you to know that he’s a big boy now who can play well. But he can get mad too, such as in Chainsaw, perhaps the best song here, when he feels like using that equipment on objects in the house that remind him of that chick that flew the coop. And so on and on.

The thing is, our little himbo isn’t exactly the best singer around, and his voice is on the thin and reedy side. Him trying to sing all these R&B and urban-style songs only make him seem even more like a bad Justin Timberlake impersonator. If he isn’t careful, one day we will all decide that he’s never going to take off his pants and do porn, and promptly lose interest. He’d need to make shopping for better songs the first thing on his to-do-next list.