Jamie Foxx. Best Night of My Life.” J.
On film, Jamie Foxx is a performer of wide range, a gifted mimic and an Oscar winner. In music, though, he plays a naif: eager second stringer, shameless trend chaser, just happy to be allowed on the field.
“Best Night of My Life” is his fourth album, which might say as much about his appetite to play the game as about his popularity. (His last two albums have been certified platinum.) Even more so than its predecessors, “Best Night” is a reasonable facsimile of the genre around him, and a deeply satisfying one at that: It’s Foxx’s best album to date.
Throughout are oodles of almost-right sonic reproductions of the sort made for film and TV by hired guns when the soundtrack calls for “party R&B” or “Southern bounce.” Foxx can hire the best producers, though, and this album’s digital, dance-oriented R&B isn’t a far cry from “Last Train to Paris,” the recent album by Diddy-Dirty Money. On “Winner” there’s even some of the pseudo rapping that Justin Timberlake has been squeezing out of his system of late.
It’s good that Timberlake doesn’t operate at full throttle, because this album’s successes often come in spite of Foxx, who sings as if he were delivering lines for the camera: declarative, extra literal, sharp at the edges. “Shorty, you drinking on that martini,” he sings on the title track, “I wanna see you in a bikini.”