Re-issue! When you put the word "masterpiece" in the title of your debut double CD, you'd damn well better be able to back it up. Thankfully, Cody Chesnutt has the goods. This precocious, sex-obsessed, spaced-out, spiritual singer is practically bursting at the seams with talent and ideas. With The Headphone Masterpiece, he delivers a homemade, lo-fi stew made of smooth funk, forceful rock, and gritty hip-hop, all topped off by the sweet-crooning voice of a great soul singer. Across 36 tracks, Chesnutt invites you into her psyche, and it's a unique journey to say the least, wending as it does from the weightiest of spiritual concerns to that morning's hard-on. So is it a masterpiece? Well, not quite. Even Mr. Chesnutt must believe that he's got better music still in him. But The Headphone Masterpiece is an ambitious opening salvo from an artist who may well take her place in the celebrated lineage that extends from Hendrix and Sly Stone through George Clinton, Prince, D'Angelo, and so on. Once he learns to harness her surging electricity, Chesnutt may offer us a true masterpiece--or even a few of them. --Marc Greilsamer
