Title Of Tafkap’s Newest Album Matches The Music

“Chaos and Disorder” The Artist Formerly Known as Prince (Warner Bros.)

Is anybody waiting for the new album by The Artist Formerly Known as Prince (TAFKAP)? Probably not, though “Chaos and Disorder” (Warner Bros.) is the kind of guitar-driven work that many fans have been clamoring for.

But this appropriately titled album carries too much contractual baggage and feels like what it is: a 20th and final album that closes out the artist’s 18-year relationship with Warner Bros.

In recent years, that relationship became particularly fractious as Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol (and was thereafter referred to either as Prince or TAFKAP) and stopped performing Prince-era material in concert. It was a two-way disassociation.

Warner Bros. dropped TAFKAP’s Paisley Park label when it proved hitless. Last year’s “Gold Experience” album hasn’t itself experienced gold (sales of 500,000 copies), and the soundtrack for Spike Lee’s “Girl 6,” a mix of mostly old recordings, has yet to break the 100,000 plateau.

In the CD booklet for “Chaos and Disorder,” TAFKAP writes: “originally intended 4 private use only, this compilation serves as the last original material recorded by (TAFKAP) 4 warner brothers records - may u live 2 see the dawn.” What’s apparent is that some of the tracks here barely lived 2 see the day, while others have been cannibalized from assorted TAFKAP side projects.

“Zannalee,” for instance, is a fairly straightforward blues recorded in 1993 for the “Glam Slam Ulysses” musical and, like “The Same December,” a rowdy anthem to brotherhood, previously existed only as a video shown before TAFKAP’s 1995 concerts.

“The Same December” is one of the more interesting tracks, blessed with a monster hook and a catchy chorus as well as TAFKAP’s familiar Utopian take on race relations (“We all came from the same December/ and in the end that’s where we’ll go/ so let’s go”). But after kicking off with full-throttle, big-band rock energy, the song shifts into a bluesy grind, its ambitions betrayed by a lack of focus. That’s a problem that undermines other tracks as well.

The title track features a raw-voiced TAFKAP riding an appropriately roiling arrangement that seems equal parts Booker T. & the MG’s and Lenny Kravitz.

On “Right the Wrong,” TAFKAP surfaces with an odd Midwestern accent to address injustices on reservations and elsewhere, but the track meanders all over the place and, with its brass-fueled insistence, sounds like an off-kilter Up With People number.