The groups first album in four years is designed to be reworked through remixes.
The Black Eyed Peas is possibly the greatest bubble gum group of the Extreme Ice Fruit Explosion era. Following in the path forged by the Monkees, the Archies and the Spice Girls, the Peas present themselves as a cast of zany characters whose music is, on one level, like a child's game, and on another, as calculatedly smart and seductive as test-marketed pop gets.
The titles of the Peas' biggest hits tell the story: the giggle-inducing pun of Don't Phunk With My Heart, the cheerily crude anatomical gesture of My Humps and now the Imax-ready sound effects burst of the chart-topping Boom Boom Pow. Crass, good-hearted, funny, unfailingly loud scavengers of every shiny thing lying on pop's cross-cultural dance floor, the Peas present themselves as juvenile, but there's plenty going on behind the mugging.
The E.N.D. - the group's fifth studio album and the third since Fergie joined and took it from the earnest hip-hop underground to the glamorous, necessarily compromised pop mainstream - is more accomplished and more confounding than any of the foursome's other efforts. It's likely to dominate radio and the internet this summer, its sharp flavours simultaneously driving listeners nuts and drawing them back.
will.i.am., the Peas' lead rapper and main idea man, has said that he doesn't envision The E.N.D. (the acronym is for "The Energy Never Dies", a nod to quantum physics that's further explained by a robotically voiced introduction to the opening track) as a regular album.
Instead, it's a template, designed to be constantly reworked through remixes, both in the recording studio and by DJs on the dance floor. Indeed, this collection has none of the attributes that make listeners love albums: no narrative arc, no ebb and flow, no break from the in-your-face beats and high-fructose hooks.
As a plunge into the users' manual of post-disco dance pop, The E.N.D. is quite charming, if predictably goofy.
Working with club-savvy collaborators including MSTRKRFT, David Guetta and Keith Harris, will.i.am takes on electro, deep house, dancehall and dance-punk, to name just a few trends.
Ever true to their defining characteristic, the Peas have no shame. Fergie puts on ill-fitting dreadlocks for the faux-Jamaican Electric City and goes hilariously punk in Now Generation, a rant about social media that sounds something like Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues rewritten on a Sidekick. Ring-a-Ling is a strangely innocent celebration of drunken booty-calling; One Tribe follows a bouncing-ball beat as will.i.am suggests that world peace might come from an amnesia epidemic.
As always, Fergie's performances provide the most interest throughout the album. More than the rappers Taboo and apl.de.ap, whose spotlight turns are always competent but down played, or will.i.am, who clings to an Everyman persona that belies his role as the group's Wizard of Oz, Fergie embraces the essential cartoonishness of being a Pea.
Whether she's being weepy in Meet Me Halfway or superbad in Imma Be, she takes her part to its logical end. Her obviousness once seemed to reflect a lack of skill, but by now it's clear that it's a strategy. As a means of grabbing attention from a hopelessly distracted audience, it works.
Most of The E.N.D. doesn't ask too much from those fans. Its more substantive musical and thematic statements are interrupted by many others showing the Peas' deep, deep commitment to a good party. There's Rock That Body, Party All the Time, Rockin' to the Beat and Out of My Head, and those are just the ones with telegraphic titles.
This filler, still waiting to be magically morphed by remixes, doesn't add much to the experience of listening to The E.N.D. all the way through. Yet a strange kind of bliss does arise after being pummelled by nearly 70 minutes worth of booms, baps and pows.
