BUDJERAH - Gentleman (Warner)

THIS IS A CLASSY debut album from Budjerah Slabb, a Coodjinburra man from the Bundjalung nation up north in NSW, who has been on the radar for three years and a set of increasingly more confident singles but wisely chose not to rush into a big statement too early. Not that you’d call this a big statement exactly, more a declaration of interests that sets his direction.

What Slabb is offering is contemporary-ish R&B (tinged with gospel and Stevie Wonder), sung by a voice just sweet enough to smooth out but not so much that it sounds treacly, set in songs that put just enough of a 21^st century sound around unmistakeably ‘90s foundations to avoid sounding like a complete retro/tribute album (but not trying too hard to hide those very roots).

While the Australian has pulled in work from a few songwriting crews, and tellingly closes out the record with one from a giant of mainstream pop song, Diane Warren – more on this later – the 11 tracks are mostly written and produced by American Om’Mas Keith whose “advanced concepts” have been favoured by some no-small-beer types like Frank Ocean and Jay-Z. And if there is a concept here it doesn’t take a genius to work it out from the decision to call it Gentleman and put him on the front in a suit (no tie).

Essentially, this isn’t aimed at the dancefloor or at particularly young buyers, but an audience that likes its music with a bit of flair and a touch of restraint, touched by sensuality rather than overt sexuality, interested but not pushy. Musically more than lyrically, Usher is the ruling principal – and by trickle-down effect, a bit of Beiber too, in his less drug-addled phase– but without Usher’s overweening ego that seeped through even the most emotionally secure of his songs.

Actually, given its split into upbeat early doors (the title track is a brisk, almost liquid mover; Want You Back tips its hat forward over the eyebrows and throws its shoulders back for some sleek moves) segueing to a mid-tempo middle (Could I Be brings his falsetto and a leaning forward momentum; Pretty eases back into leather seats like he’s hoping you will soon), on the way to a slow, high emotion finish (Lonely does ring more than a few Wonder ballad bells; Let Me Know must surely be sung on one knee, jacket off when the choir arrives) Gentleman does suggest a Nelly-ish Sweat/Suit dichotomy on a smaller scale.

All of which suggests careful consideration, and wrong moves aren’t obvious. However, it can’t be avoided that Even At My Worst ends the album on slightly sickly note, a Dianne Warren song that is superbly generic, surely written in advance for a young graduate of The Voice or the like, or better still a boy group of indeterminate age/race/reality whose twinkling (or twinking) charm would make the perfunctory lyrics irrelevant. It could work in any market at any time for anyone. Which is a good thing, presumably, on the balance sheet: you don’t call up Warren for a stocking/album filler even 20 years after her peak.

But then that song and its reflection of every bit of that careful consideration mentioned earlier does hit on a question which will hang over Budjerah for a while yet: how much the controlling forces around him – management, marketers, label, producers, songwriters, percentage-takers of any sort – will allow him to emerge beyond this? To which you can add, how much will he push them to do so?

For now, there’s a marvellous tone to him, a sense of style vocally and musically, that is as easy on the ear as he is on the eye, but individuality is less clear, and so is how special he could yet be.

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