For all the uniqueness Kiss Land had production wise, it was still a really unmemorable record. I can only recall the two bonus tracks as they were the two best songs on the record, the Pharell Remix and the Kavinsky collaboration. Most of the record wasn't as great as two tracks delegated to the bonus section, which is kind of sad. I think Kiss Land could have been great if he built it around a certain theme and tightened the flow of the record. It's a really long album.
And for its worth, I don't think he really wanted to continue down that dark R&B track. He very clearly wanted to be a pop star, with his Dirty Diana cover and crooning on Kiss Land. He just jumped at the first opportunity he got to fill that MJ void. I'm just sad he scrapped a whole album worth of material with Doc McKinney a.k.a. the guy who executive produced House of Balloons and Thursday.
That was generally my problem with Kiss Land when you took away it's production value: it overall felt like a bunch of songs he wrote random things for, it's lyrical content just didn't really match up with it's production, but even with that, I still found a few songs memorable, like 'The Town', 'Belong To The World', and the title song, 'Kiss Land'. Sadly most I can even vouch for was the production, especially in 'Pretty.' Pretty probably had the least interesting vocals and lyrics, yet that production stood out harder than the rest of that song.
Kiss Land feels like one of those albums I wish I can defend but sadly couldn't hold up beyond "
ahah, it sounds great!", even then I'll still give it some defense. I still need to give praise to Belong To The World for being one of the songs that legitimately worked out well though.
And yeah, I can definitely see that he wanted to be a Pop star, not that it should be seen as a bad thing, just a shame that he cut so many lines with other producers like Doc McKinney for higher classes to get where he is now.