Avant

Avant’s mission: to boldly plow ladies like nobody’s plowed them before. His MO: 62 minutes of slow-burn come-on. At first spin, it’s indistinguishable from any other just-good-enough male R&B grooving up to the plate lately. It’s languid even when the breathing gets heavy — the nods to hip-hop and ’70s funk, though encouraging, fail to melt a central iciness. You see, for all his love talk, Avant never sounds horny. That he’s fucktastic is simply the point that the genre compels him to prove, and he goes through the motions like an old married couple. But it ain’t no thing. As placeholder soul — a record to keep in the rotation until something better supplants it — Private Room is one of this season’s champs, with changes and hooks just solid enough to get the head bobbing. Yeah, it’s a little boring. Yeah, even the press materials refer to “Wanna Be Close” as “the requisite ballad.” Yeah, this disc’s not getting anybody laid except Avant himself. But it still goes down easy.