Quite different from Contact, his 2017 full-length debut, Mall of Fortune shows Harriet Brown starting to come into his own as a one-man R&B band. Whereas Contact was pieced together from discontinuous sessions at a number of locations, this was made in a concentrated shot across 2017 and 2018, recorded strictly in Brown's home studio with minimal outside input. Brown spent much of Contact refashioning late-'80s and early-'90s new jack swing. Here, the scope widens to cover synthetic pop-R&B from the tail-end of the disco era through the candy-coated early-2000s work of the Neptunes. Despite the obvious inspirations, some of these songs, such as consecutive highlights "Hardwalkin'" and "Bag Away" -- which are something like intercepted, overdubbed, and liberally warped demos intended for Jordan Knight's first solo album -- have an undeniably peculiar appeal. Brown's vocals still tend to sound coolly distanced, but even some of the flirtatious moments here have a little more emotional force than they did on Contact.