Send "Janelle Monae " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Chicagotribune |
 Janelle Monae’s hair could’ve been designed by an architect. With her angular features and Grace Jones-with-a-riding-crop couture, she oozes exotic mystique. Her music, she says in the liner notes to her new album, draws inspiration from Fela’s cigarettes, Peter Pan, Bob Marley’s smile, Stevie Wonder’s drumming, Jack White’s mustache and a stage dive she once took at a music festival. Given that introduction, her debut album, “The ArchAndroid,” has a lot to live up to -- and it does.Monae, a 24-year-old Kansas City-born singer who now lives in Atlanta, announced her ambitions in 2008 by releasing an EP, “Metropolis,” the first of an intended four-part science-fiction concept album. She was instead signed by Sean “Diddy” Combs to his Bad Boy label, and “Metropolis” eventually morphed into “The ArchAndroid,” in which she assumes an alter-ego personality as Cindi Mayweather, a messiah-like figure from the distant future who returns to the present to save a community of androids. Got it? Loaded with vivid imagery and sound effects that resonate like movie scenes, “The ArchAndroid” is Monae’s bid to make an “emotion picture” about her futuristic world. The story line is complicated enough that only diehards will want to parse its every nuance, but it provides a framework for music that points both forward and back, embracing classical overtures, tribal funk, big-band swing, glam-rock and hip-hop. In some ways, it sounds an awful lot like an album her fellow Atlantans OutKast might’ve made. Indeed, she first found a measure of recognition with her vocals on OutKast’s 2006 album, “Idlewild,” and Antwan “Big Boi” Patton of the hip-hop duo is listed as co-executive producer of “The ArchAndroid” and contributes a vocal to the percussive single “Tightrope.”...full text |
| Ew |
| This energetic singer's debut comes with a narrative concept about robots. On The ArchAndroid, the real story, however, is her arrival as an uncontainable new talent. A protégée of both Diddy and OutKast's Big Boi, she dives headlong into sounds including pop, funk, soul, rock, disco, and cabaret. Does every genre suit her equally? Of course not, but most of Janelle Monée's mad experiments yield spectacularly catchy results. A–...full text |
| Pastemagazine |
| Janelle Monáe’s long-awaited debut album opens with the sounds of an orchestra tuning and some polite applause, then a sharp jab of strings, the rise of an ominous choir and flittering woodwinds. If you’re sitting in front of the computer you just bought the record on, dressed in sweats and a t-shirt, you might feel underdressed. And rightly so: The ArchAndroid is a fully immersive, theatrical experience. It’s a near-perfect R&B album; hell, it’s a fantastic hip-hop, psychedelic, neo-soul, dance and orchestral album too. It’s hard to classify but harder to ignore, matching Monáe’s massive stylistic scope and ambition with endless melodies, can’t-help-but-smile jams and an all-star cast of guest artists, including Big Boi, Saul Williams, Deep Cotton and Of Montreal. The 18-track epic brings to mind Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life; its stunning, sophisticated tunes spanning styles, speeds and sentiments, all tied together by a smorgasbord of artistic personalities....full text |
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