Album Review: Mary J Blige “Stronger With Each Tear”

At 39, Mary J Blige unfortunately finds herself in danger of being replaced on the airwaves by some surgically-enhanced autotuned chick at the whim of notoriously ageist and sexist radio programmers.

So with her ninth studio album, Mary is clearly fighting to stay relevant, with calculated guest raps from T.I. and Drake. Which is not to say that Mary has turned out an album of hip-hop samples and clumsy hooks. For the most part, Stronger With Each Tear has immediate melodies, with classic bass and piano arrangements.

And here’s a thing: Mary’s expressive, churchy voice just gets better and better, with good taste and judgement displayed on when to stick to the melody and when to let rip. And when she does, there is a clarity and bird-like quality on the highest notes which wasn’t there in her early days.

As ever, Mary is best on the midtempo odes to love and heartbreak such as Each Tear and I Am. The uptempos sound rather forced, and the whole enterprise sounds like the second attempt in a row to recreate the sounds and success of her remarkable The Breakthrough album. Which is a backward step – at the start of her career, each Mary album had its own distinct feel.

It’s when Mary moves away from the constraints of what will work on American R&B radio that she is truly at her most creative. “Never let a girl cook in ya kitchen” she warns in Kitchen, displaying a humour too often absent in the serious world of R&B.

But Mary’s sheer passion explodes on the haunting, Motown-inspired  retro soul of Colors. Possibly truly inspired by the weepy movie Precious for which it was recorded, Colors is so intense it  wipes the floor with anything she’s recorded in ten years. It’s a real shame that a similar passion does not run through the veins of the rest of the tracks.

She’s teased us like this before, channelling Aretha to earth shattering effect on the similarly retro I Found My Everything on The Breakthrough. So while Stronger With Each Tear is just good enough, maybe it’s time for a new, possibly retro direction – Back to Black without the drugs references, perhaps.

That new direction may only come when she no longer has to please radio programmers and record company accountants, but it’s something we can look forward to with relish. In the meantime, she should at least drop the rent-a-rapper nonsense.

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Album Review: Whitney Houston “I Look To You”

It’s been a decade since Whitney Houston last had a hit studio album. In that time, a new generation knew her more for being celebrity gossip blog fodder than for her glorious voice. There was a misguided and short-lived attempt at a comeback with 2002′s Just Whitney, which sounded like it was recorded for the best interests of the bottom line of the record company rather than Houston herself, who was clearly not ready to face her demons.

The difference this time is that she is healthy and back with her industry Father, Clive Davis who steered her to the vast majority of the 170 million albums sold in the course of her career. At 77 years of age, the man clearly still has an ear for a great melody, something often missing in the “beat-hook-and-guest-rapper” output of today’s Pop and R&B market.

Although there are no explicit references to divorce or dependency, there is some insight into Whitney the woman, an element which has been missing from Houston albums in the past. That changed on Just Whitney, even if the defiant message was not what we necessarily what fans wanted to hear. On I Didn’t Know My Own Strength, we see Houston has a woman who has overcome adversity, soaring on a classically produced but rather clunky Diane Warren ballad.

Reflective and thoughtful on the title track, Houston is humble in the presence of a higher power that has helped her through “winter storms”. If this sounds ready for Oprah, you’d be right, but there is more conviction in these ballads than a million years of Rihanna slow jams.  She asks us to love her “Like I never left” on the Akon track of the same name, testifying that even a diva needs affirmation. She explains that she has “Nothin’ But Love” for her admirers and haters, over a punchy Danja beat, though some of the lyrics (shouting out to her crew?) ill fit a 46 year old woman.

Though best known for ballads, Whitney also has a considerable repertoire of big uptempo hits, and she can add one more to the tally with the slinky Alicia Keys opener Million Dollar Bill.  The opening belt lets you know the  voice is back, and Whitney rides a retro disco beat singing about meeting a stranger sounding as carefree as a newly divorced woman should. Possibly channelling the late Michael Jackson, she  bites into her notes on the dancefloor-ready For The Lovers. But the biggest uptempo surprise is  a cover of Leon Russell’s A Song For You, which starts as a ballad then transforms into  a clubby slice of gay disco, sprinkled with delicious falsetto notes as the song builds to a big crescendo in signature Whitney style.

However, it is the midtempo R&B where the album is at its most succesful. On Worth It, she recalls Mary J Blige glories such as Be Without You; Call You Tonight sounds ready for US mainstream R&B radio if they are ready to give an older artist a chance, and I Got You, with its and sassy, confident delivery, is a triumph. Unlike most albums, Houston saves her best for last, laying to rest a lover with so much venom in her voice you can almost imagine her forked tongue on Salute. The R Kelly piano-driven beats and the layered vocals recall the glory days of diva R&B in the early 2000s and is the highlight of an incredibly solid, filler-free album.

The big question of course, is whether Houston still has it. The answer has to be is that the voice is not what it was in terms of power and purity – there are  certainly no big I Will Always Love You style key changes – but with it has come a maturity, grit and more focused interpretive ability. On I Look To You, she displays superior vocal story-telling gifts than she showed on any of her early output, even if the notes are lower and the belts less powerful and sustained. But it’s all relative, she’s singing circles round nearly all of the wannabe divas today, and with Davis at her side, long may she reign.

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