On , returned to a bass-heavy groove sound with a new band, which made for a funkier result than on recent albums, but he still wasn't coming up with slogans to match those of old -- and just didn't rank with And given that largely buried his vocals in the mix, it wouldn't have been easy to tell if he did have something to say. (One time you could hear him, though, was on a cover of 's that rewrote into a vaguely religious/environmentalist message song.) hadn't been humbled by his recent lack of commercial success: "the King, as you've named me, has come back to set our musical record straight again like , and now ," he wrote in his liner notes. But the accomplishments didn't match the rhetoric. ~ William Ruhlmann