Patience [UK]

1	Patience 2:53
2	Amazing 4:25
3	John and Elvis Are Dead 4:23
4	Cars and Trains 5:51
5	Round Here 5:56
6	Shoot the Dog 5:07
7	My Mother Had a Brother 6:17
8	Flawless (Go to the City) 6:51
9	American Angel 4:07
10	Precious Box 7:39
11	Please Send Me Someone (Anselmo's Song) 5:26
12	Freeek! '04 4:28
13	Through 5:22
14	Patience, Pt. 2 1:30

Barnes & Noble

For his diehard fans -- who entertained themselves with 1999's campy collection of standards, Songs from the Last Century, and waited eight years to hear new material, Patience proves to be their great reward. Like fellow '80s icon Prince, who also made a comeback in 2004 with the inspired Musicology, George Michael returns to making music that's both a platform for his proselytizing and substantive enough to please the masses. Lyrically, Michael revisits the universal themes of love, loss, persecution, and redemption found on 1990's excellent, Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1. But in light of his more recent indiscretions -- namely, his humiliating arrest in 1998 for soliciting a male police officer in a Beverly Hills park bathroom -- the openly gay Michael isn't afraid to tackle more personal subject matter. On the poignant "My Mother Had a Brother," he laments the suicide of his uncle, who felt tormented by his own homosexuality. As he did with the melancholy "Jesus to a Child" (from 1996's Older), here the 40-year-old pop star dedicates a song -- the Latin-tinged "Please Send Me Someone (Anselmo's Song)" -- to a lover who died of AIDS. This time, however, Michael sounds optimistic that his prayers for another companion will be answered, and on the breezy "Amazing" and the soaring "American Angel," he sings of the new love that sustains him. Although no Michael effort would be complete without his waxing philosophical in his breathtaking falsetto about the injustices of God and man -- addressed here on the somber title track and the borderline-silly "John and Elvis Are Dead" -- Patience finds the singer-songwriter in a more festive mood. In the vein of Faith's "I Want Your Sex" and Older's "Fastlove," Michael waves his glow stick on the fervent disco anthems "Precious Box," "Freeek! 04," and "Flawless (Go to the City)." Although the tortured "Through" --on which he claims, "Suddenly, the audience is so cruel" -- suggests that this disc may be his last, for our sake let's hope Michael merely needs another lengthy sabbatical to craft his next masterpiece. Tracy E. Hopkins

All Music Guide

Almost immediately after he became an international superstar with 1987's Faith, George Michael developed a complex that he was not taken seriously as an artist. He was right -- he wasn't being taken seriously, but at the height of their success, mainstream pop stars rarely are; it's only after they've been around for a while that critics and audiences alike appreciate the craft behind their best work. Elton John and Madonna both are pop icons who earned good reviews after they proved their lasting power, but Michael, for want of a better phrase, didn't have enough patience to wait to be regarded as an artist, not just a pop star. So, he followed Faith with 1990's Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1, whose very title was a plea to skeptics to shed their preconceived notions of him and hear the music anew. At the time, it seemed like this was temporary hiccup, a somber exorcism Michael needed to work through as an artist, but over the years, it's clear that this was the blueprint for his solo career. Not that there have been that many albums since then, of course. Michael took six years to deliver Older, a delay that was initially blamed on a vicious battle with his record company, Sony, but its own successor, Patience, didn't appear for another eight years, a time which not only had no spats with the label but also saw him re-signing to Sony. Those long, long separations between albums suggest that Michael is a painstaking perfectionist in the studio, and Patience sure sounds like the work of a musician who spent every day of those eight years working on these 14 tracks (12 on the U.S. version; the anti-Bush and -Blair "Shoot the Dog" was excised for the American CD, presumably because it would be too controversial, but who knows why the reprise of "Patience" was cut).

While there are unifying lyrical and musical themes throughout the album, each track is its own entity, scrubbed, polished, and manicured without regard to how it fits alongside the next. There's an excessive attention to detail to each song, and that tunnel vision means each song runs about a minute or two longer than it should, which ultimately makes Patience seems twice as long as its actual running time. That's unfortunate because the core of the album is quite good: it's hard not to admire his studiocraft, there's a starkly confessional streak in his writing that's disarmingly direct, and, as an album, it balances the moody ballads and sleek neo-disco better than Older, feeling much brighter than that claustrophobic affair. If there's a lack of incessantly catchy hooks or undeniable rhythms -- in other words, singles as indelible as those on Faith, or even Listen Without Prejudice -- that feels like a conscious decision by Michael, as if any concession to chart-bound pop would cheapen his music and diminish his chances of being taken seriously. They would have lightened the mood of the decidedly somber and portentous Patience, which is clearly not what Michael wants, since by stretching out each song and burying his hooks beneath the album's shiny surfaces and preponderance of mid-tempos, he's forcing listeners to work to understand his intentions. For some fans, it's worth the effort, particularly since it's his best album since Listen Without Prejudice (not saying much since it's only his second album of original material since then), but it's hard not to hear it and think that Michael's ultimate ambitions would be better served if he tightened up and lightened up just a little bit. Stephen Thomas Erlewine

People Magazine

The disc, which sounds like a sequel to 1990's sublime Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1, demonstrates why the British star should have been -- and could still wind up being, if he doesn't stick to his claim that this will be his last CD -- the Elton John of his generation. Chuck Arnold