Justin Guarini Albums (2)
'Stranger Things Have Happened'
Release Date 1/1/2005
Tracks 10
Label Justice Entertainment
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
It's hard to say that anyone who became a star, however briefly, when he was a teenage heartthrob on the number one television show in America, then received a chance to record his own album, and then starred in a major motion picture bearing his own name in the title got a raw deal, but it sure is easy to feel a little sorry for Justin Guarini. In 2002, he was all the rage, the runaway star of the first season of American Idol. Kelly Clarkson may have won the competition -- she was the better singer, after all -- but as the show was airing, Justin had all the adulation, not just from the teenyboppers in the audience but from the online community. When the show concluded, it seemed like both Justin and Kelly had it made. And then came the rush-released movie From Justin to Kelly, a cheap, silly musical that dinged Kelly's reputation while completely derailing Justin's career. The film arrived in theaters a mere ten days after his eponymous debut album hit the stores, and the record was buried in an avalanche of bad press for the film. Justin Guarini may have peaked at 20 on the Billboard charts, but no single charted and soon the singer turned the butt of jokes, even on American Idol itself. Justin surely deserved some of the ridicule: he was an incorrigible ham, often recalling a lounge singer, and his dreads were rightly mimicked as Sideshow Bob hair, giving him a clownish appearance (and, of course, his name sounds kind of funny). Be that as it may, Guarini had charisma and a good show-biz voice that he used to the hilt on his pop album -- which may have bombed, but it was a good, slick collection of dance-pop. Perhaps if it had been delivered earlier, at the end of 2002, just a few months after the conclusion of the first season instead of at the end of the second -- a release pattern that the show would follow beginning in 2003, after Justin's flop -- it might have been a bigger hit, but there's no use speculating: what happened happened, sending Guarini far away from the spotlight. And as American Idol dragged on through the years, piling up outright failures from runner-ups like Diana DeGarmo and Bo Bice, as winners like Fantasia Barrino and Ruben Studdard failed to become huge stars, Justin started to not seem so bad after all. Hindsight may be 20/20, but that doesn't help get records made. It took a long time for Guarini to jump-start his career again, but he finally managed to finish his second album toward the end of 2005, a matter of weeks before the fifth season of the show began. Its title, Stranger Things Have Happened, is an immediate tip-off that Guarini has a sense of humor about a potential comeback, but as it turns out, it's not just as an allusion to the possibility of him returning to the spotlight -- it is surely a knowing allusion to his musical makeover, since this album finds him abandoning dance-pop for vocal jazz. True, it's loungey, Am-Idol-styled vocal jazz, but Stranger Things Have Happened is vocal jazz all the same, and while the material may not come as a surprise (it's old warhorses like "Night and Day," "My Funny Valentine," etc.), what is a surprise is that Guarini does give his band room to roam, to actually play with the arrangements and solo. It's not just a generous gesture, but it does signal that Justin is attempting to establish himself as a musician, not just a show-biz creation. If his talents nevertheless still lie toward the show-biz side of the equation, there's no shame in that -- he has genuine, natural charisma as a supper club-styled singer, and that charisma when contrasted with his band's jazz chops has a nice, relaxed appeal. This is best heard when Guarini sticks to delivering the song in his straight-ahead breezy style -- try as he may (and he tries on nearly every song here), Justin cannot scat and the album grinds to a halt whenever he tries to do so. But disregarding that, Stranger Things Have Happened is a surprisingly successful reinvention. At his heart, Guarini is still a show-biz creation, but this is a setting where his natural skills shine. Listening to it, it's easy to remember why he was a pop culture sensation for a few months in 2002. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Arriving a discreet amount of time after American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson's chart-topping debut, Thankful, and just before the release of their movie, From Justin to Kelly, Justin Guarini's self-titled album is, at the very least, positioned for almost certain success on a massive scale. Fortunately, though, Justin Guarini has more than just marketing and calculation going for it -- much like Thankful, the album is much better than might be expected, providing a smooth transition from his AmIdol roots into more adventurous musical territory. Of course, "adventurous" is a relative term when it comes to crafting an album that must appeal to as many different types of people as possible. At times, it just means putting a crunchy, slightly urban beat behind his signature American Idol songs like "Unchained Melody" and "Get Here" to give them a bit of an "edge" without straying too far from mainstream pop territory. But considering that RCA could probably sell millions of copies of an album that featured nothing but songs like these, the musical risks that Guarini does take are welcome and work surprisingly well. Most of the album takes its cue from urban and teen pop; indeed, songs like "Be a Heartbreaker," "I Saw Your Face," and "Thinking of You" mix those styles so seamlessly that they suggest what Justin Timberlake's Justified might've sounded like if he'd had a less forward-thinking production team than the Neptunes at the helm. Likewise, Justin Guarini's most progressive-sounding tracks, such as "Sorry," recall the futuristic spin on Michael Jackson's Off the Wall that the other Justin's album offered. Though it nods to Latin pop with "One Heart Too Many," the majority of the album sticks to an urban/teen pop/mainstream pop fusion that plays to Guarini's strengths as a performer and a persona, which is a savvy decision by the people behind American Idol. Along with its similarities to the variety shows of the '60s and '70s, the series' star-making process recalls old Hollywood's star system, where teams of experts would mold promising newcomers into archetypal performers, refining everything from their looks to the way they walked and talked. American Idol's team cast Kelly Clarkson as the girl next door who occasionally takes a walk on the wild side, and Guarini has been cast as a relatively chaste sex symbol. Granted, this role has been around since pop music's infancy, but on Justin Guarini the singer occasionally seems overly confined by it, particularly on the limp ballad "Condition of My Heart" and the album's low point, the cloyingly up-tempo "Inner Child." It's a little strange that Guarini's sex appeal is curtailed as much as it is, since he was generally considered the sexiest (or at least, most conventionally sexy) of the finalists, and also since Thankful made a point of emphasizing Clarkson's sexiness in a classy way. When Guarini does get to let loose, it makes for some of the album's best moments, such as "Doin' Things (We're Not Supposed to Do)," a sultry song that sounds both appropriate for a pop star in his early twenties to sing and for his preteen fans to hear; "If You Wanna" is a tougher, more urban-flavored song that is all the more promising because Guarini co-wrote it. In the end, this album isn't as surprising or diverse a debut as Thankful was, but its solid quality proves that the forces behind American Idol want their winners to make good pop albums, as opposed to one mega-hit single backed by 11 throwaway tracks. Justin Guarini might be calculated, but it's not cynical. ~ Heather Phares, All Music Guide
