When it was announced that multiple albums were on the way featuring music from the unreleased vaults of Michael Jackson, I was a bit worried.  Further was the fact that they were going to modernize the songs (a concern, if you recall the album that followed The Notorious B.I.G’s death). The first fruits of this, “Love Never Felt So Good,” has been released in advance of the album “Xscape,” and it’s pretty good.

One thing I appreciate is a deluxe version of the album will include the original source material, if people want to see what Michael ultimately accomplished with it. This is similar to the untouched version of Karen Carpenter’s solo album that was released in 1996, after her brother had remixed songs for Carpenters releases prior to that.

That said, there’s only eight tracks on the album, which implies a steady milking of his reputation, and concerns me that there’s not enough material to handle the number of releases suggested by the record deal, so we’ll have to see. In the meantime, this is head and shoulders better than “Breaking News,” so hopefully we see more of this sort of release to follow.