Kamasutra

Most people would put photos into their wedding album but not Prince, he created an actual album to celebrate his marriage to Mayte. Kamasutra is Prince’s first fully instrumental project since Madhouse. It opens with The Plan, earlier released on Emancipation at the time the standalone release of Kamasutra was abandoned, it is therefore the most familiar track on the disk. The title track follows, and arcs seamlessly through light and dark on an epic scale, it showcases an operatic take – complete with movements – on Prince’s music, an avenue he was heavily exploring in the mid-1990s for theatre productions of his own. In it is a nice detail, strains of Still Would Stand All Time. The remainder of the album is comprised of shorter ambient cutz, if forgive the pun, yet the instrumentation is never dull. While this is no Madhouse reboot, the closest we get are with Promise Made / Broken and the album’s most ambitious track, the grandly named Overture 8, which are also the album’s best tracks. The penultimate track is the softly does it Coincidence Or Fate, whose name was emblazoned on the cover of the wedding programme. Kamasutra closes with Eternal Embrace, which for anyone wondering what Prince would have sounded like in 17th Century then consider your search over. Kamasutra was instead repackaged into Crystal Ball, and whilst never deserving of a fully-fledged release of its own, the album is a great accompanying disk and one that is just about accessible to be explored more often.