Full Disclosure: I do not need 37 slightly different versions of anyone’s album. It just feels like a blatant grab to increase sales or extend a chart run (cough::Taylor Swift::cough). However! Victoria Monet barely charts and does not sell many albums (no shade, just a fact) so I was hoping Jaguar II: Deluxe would feel more like a project where the artist said “you know what, I’m not finished with this statement,” and continued on in the same vein to fully flesh out the experience.
And that’s just what she did.
On the Deluxe issue, Victoria is still digging through crates of soul classics from yesteryear as her inspiration, and I’m still here for the strategy. I hope she never leaves this lane because she is doing it better than anyone else — and she knows her audience. Jessie Ware found a lane and has been making albums for Rich People in Caftans ever since. Saweetie makes Rap for Pretty Girls Who Like to Shop. P!nk has made the same album for Suburban Moms Who Had a Lesbian Phase in College over and over since the mid 2000s. Victoria Monet is making R&B for People Who Have a Favorite Living Single Character (…Regine, obv). It’s for people who remember the Quiet Storm radio block but think they can still get down at the club (you cannot, your knees are not what they used to be). This is R&B for adults.
If you’re streaming the album, you get the old-school vibe right off the top because she has it laid out as Disc 1 and Disc 2, taking you right back to the times where we did wait in line at the record store for a new release or went downtown to trawl through used CDs at the record store.
The second disc is about half an hour with seven songs (not counting the interludes) so it really is a deluxe, double-album version as opposed to 2 or 3 new tracks interwoven into the album. On the first song, “DickAtNight,” Victoria pretty much confirms that this will again be modern relationship threads dipped in nostalgia and the production on it is perfect. It feels like Nick at Night, which isn’t an emotion or a feeling I thought I would get from a song released in 2024. There are no skips, and the collaboration with Usher is very well placed, but the middle section has me in a chokehold. Honestly, fuck her for making a song called “1900s” like we need to conjure images of trolley service and a Model T Ford, and fuck her twice for making it so good. An Anita Baker sample, a slight hint of South African amapiano, and Victoria in her best early 90s Janet delivery? I’m sold. It doesn’t get much better than that.
But then it did! With a seamless transition into a classic!
I generally think you must be out of your mind to cover Sade, let alone a classic like “Love Is Stronger Than Pride,” so I was extremely nervous to hear what she would do with it.
What I love most about R&B artists like Tinashe, Normani, Dawn Richard, and Victoria Monet is the way they approach a production. You can tell that they are dancers by the way they create a song. On the original, Sade comes from a wistful place with a stripped down instrumental — it’s not too much going on, just classic Sade. Victoria cannot create that, and she doesn’t need to. She took the song to a basement, the party after the cookout when you sweat the brown liquor out with a cute two-step.
But she still recreated those moments from the original. Sade’s ad libs? In tact. Electric Spanish guitar ad libs? Check. Pan flute (keyboard) ad libs? Check. Home run on a Sade cover was not on my Victoria Monet bingo card.
If I had any qualms about the project, it’s just my personal preference that Victoria stay in her vocal lane. She doesn’t have a big chest voice, so her trying to get out a couple of belts on “Everybody Needs Someone” feels uncomfortable and a bit forced for me. I appreciate an artist always trying to stretch, but also I’m okay with not fixing what’s not broken.
But in short, Jaguar II: Deluxe was a great way to start my Friday. If she hadn’t already won a Grammy for this album, she probably could have done it with just Disc 2 alone. If nothing else, she has solidified her ability to continuously make retro feel fresh.
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