It’s been a little over five years since the King of Pop passed away, but his music still lives on. Jackson was a perfectionist about his music, and he recorded many more songs than he ever released. That means that there's a lot of unreleased material in his archives and so we have this album, songs which probably escaped the magnifying glass of Michael.

The album has a total of 17 tracks, eight tracks brought together by music legend L.A Reid and reinvented by world class producers, including renowned studio veterans Timbaland, Rodney Jerkins, John MCClain and Stargate. These guys took these eight best and complete unreleased music and made it feel as though it’s new, as fresh as if Michael was still with us. The next eight tracks are the original versions of the tracks as Michael had recorded them in his time. The final cut has pop R & B singer Justin Timberlake in a remix with Jackson on the original version of Love Never Felt so Good where Jackson uses a sample of his track Working Day and Night on this disco swing track.

Most the tracks were laid down between 1983 and 1999, sometime after Jackson made it big which was after his album ‘Thriller’. Jackson’s voice still has that freshness even though we might come to know that the songs were recorded almost 15 years ago or even more. His vocal style with the infamous swoops, pops, shouts and grunts, are all still intact on the album and one can hear them clearly. This is the reason why ‘Xscape’ works in his favor, as it still holds all the ingredients of Jackson. The producers, who have worked with the legend in the past, also knew his language and the style he would love to hear the songs, not forgetting fans around the world who would love this package. The producers connect with the music and bring the excitement and the magic that is Michael Jackson.

The songs on ‘Xscape’ speak about joy and desperation and are written by Michael right through, except on Love Never Felt so Good where he shares writing duties with Paul Anka (best known for his work with Frank Sinatra). Though most of the songs are up-tempo, we have two pure love songs, two tracks about trying to find a world where the pain does not seem to exist (A Place With No Name and Xscape) and four songs about being trapped (bad relationships or female abuse).

The album has shades of Jackson's previous hits, and so you might find familiar material of Jackson’s when you cue into A Place With No Name that is almost identical to 1987's Leave Me Alone, whereas Blue Gangsta comes close to his fab work on 1995's Earth Song. Jackson takes his vocals styling’s with hee hee yelps on the electro Do You Know Where Your Children Are that speaks of female abuse. Xscape has a bit of 80s disco, while Chicago has some good synth lines and stuttering beats, you have excellent piano on the opening bars of the soulful Loving You The song that has the best Jackson vocal would be the opener Love Never Felt so Good which is also its oldest song as it dates from 1983 or so. The original take, which is mostly just his voice, finger snaps and a piano showcases the kind of magic he had even when he was singing unplugged.

It would be wise to check out the original tracks first and then move to the re – produced tracks step by step, so you can gauge how the producers have reinvented each song. One example is the poppy Loving You and its reworked punchy version.

Don’t miss out the DVD that shows how the album came to be recorded and the work that went in making this album of the Peter Pan of Pop. Includes lyrics to all songs.

-Reviewed by Verus Ferreira