Patience

Calling a long-anticipated album—one that had been at least five years in the making and pushed back on two occasions thanks to bouts of depression—<i>Patience</i> feels, on the face of it, like an extremely George Michael move. And true enough, under the hood, this expansive, 70-minute fifth (and, exactly as Michael himself intended, final) studio album can feel like a sonic buffet, encompassing various eras, musical styles and thematic preoccupations. In practice, this means we get both the effervescent, anti-Blair and -Bush satire of the Human League-sampling “Shoot the Dog” and the lovestruck, floor-filling soul of “Amazing”. But <i>Patience</i>’s long gestation (stoked and heavily informed by the death of Michael’s beloved mother and his continued rage at the conflict in Iraq) only yields a more rounded, eclectic and messily human artistic statement. “Freeek! ’04” nods to thrusting, futurist R&B while the autobiographical “Round Here”—with its hushed, nostalgic world of football matches and church halls—points to an artist unafraid to show the many sides of his character. <i>Patience</i> shows that getting to that point of creative clarity and confidence was, in many senses, completely worth the wait.