Alicia Keys - "Wreckless Love" (mp3)
Grammy voters and the record buying public alike have been in love with Alicia Keys since the moment she entered the public eye, for the very same reason that cantankerous bastards like me have always regarded her with suspicion: she's just a little too perfect. She plays reverently traditional R&B with a slightly modern, hip hop twist, but looks way more like a model than your average neo-soul balladeer, and has a surname so groaningly apt that it just has to be fake (and is). But while every year seems to bring a new piano-playing pop prodigy who's being groomed as their label's big prestige project, only to crash and burn with a sophomore slump a year or two later, Alicia Keys has gotten bigger and better, and won over at least one crank through the 2 or 3 pretty fucking great singles off her second album. I'm still fearful of the idea of watching her show up on every awards show for the next 50 years, reverently paying tribute to soul music geniuses like Stevie Wonder (and, uh, George Michael) until she's eventually presumed to be one herself and people reverently pay tribute to her. But for the time being, I'll encourage that phenomenon and admit that she's got a few jams.
So despite the oversung and underwritten lead single "No One," I found myself looking forward to Keys' new album As I Am. I'll say despite the title, too -- note to all musical artists everywhere: stop putting words like "I" and "me" and "diary" and "autobiography" in your album titles. If your name and face are on the cover, we kinda already get that it's all about you. So maybe go simple with the self-titled approach or, god forbid, actually try to come up with something original or intriguing or meaningful for a title, something that isn't an empty platitude. The thing is that the album actually does have a somewhat profounnd underlying theme, with the strong carpe diem undercurrent running through "Like You'll Never See Me Again," the last 2 songs on the album, and less explicitly on several other tracks. Any number of those songs could've provided the album with a meaningful title, but no, boring old 'universal' As I Am is good enough for Alicia Keys.
The album gets off to a slow start, with an intro that borders on self-parody (fluttery classical piano flourishes over a hip hop break -- it's Alicia Keys, everybody!), a couple songs that plod almost as much as "No One," then "No One" itself, then a brief respite from boredom in the great "Like You'll Never See Me Again," and then another dull song, one with John Mayer where she cannibalizes her own "A Woman's Worth." But then As I Am hits a really great middle third, heralded by a trio of songs with the word "love" in the title, starting with "Wreckless Love." As a horn section revs up, she intones "let's take it back a little bit, y'know, it's not that it's not good now," but instead of some nostalgia trip about old R&B or something, it's an incredibly exhilarating song about young love (a sentiment echoed by one of the other best songs on the album, "Teenage Love Affair"). The verses feature a barebones arrangement of twinkling, almost music box-style piano over shuffling drums, and then the chorus is a big swooning wall of harmonies and strings. It's joyous and uplifting in a way that you get the feeling Alicia Keys is always aiming for, but so rarely actually hits.
Grammy voters and the record buying public alike have been in love with Alicia Keys since the moment she entered the public eye, for the very same reason that cantankerous bastards like me have always regarded her with suspicion: she's just a little too perfect. She plays reverently traditional R&B with a slightly modern, hip hop twist, but looks way more like a model than your average neo-soul balladeer, and has a surname so groaningly apt that it just has to be fake (and is). But while every year seems to bring a new piano-playing pop prodigy who's being groomed as their label's big prestige project, only to crash and burn with a sophomore slump a year or two later, Alicia Keys has gotten bigger and better, and won over at least one crank through the 2 or 3 pretty fucking great singles off her second album. I'm still fearful of the idea of watching her show up on every awards show for the next 50 years, reverently paying tribute to soul music geniuses like Stevie Wonder (and, uh, George Michael) until she's eventually presumed to be one herself and people reverently pay tribute to her. But for the time being, I'll encourage that phenomenon and admit that she's got a few jams.
So despite the oversung and underwritten lead single "No One," I found myself looking forward to Keys' new album As I Am. I'll say despite the title, too -- note to all musical artists everywhere: stop putting words like "I" and "me" and "diary" and "autobiography" in your album titles. If your name and face are on the cover, we kinda already get that it's all about you. So maybe go simple with the self-titled approach or, god forbid, actually try to come up with something original or intriguing or meaningful for a title, something that isn't an empty platitude. The thing is that the album actually does have a somewhat profounnd underlying theme, with the strong carpe diem undercurrent running through "Like You'll Never See Me Again," the last 2 songs on the album, and less explicitly on several other tracks. Any number of those songs could've provided the album with a meaningful title, but no, boring old 'universal' As I Am is good enough for Alicia Keys.
The album gets off to a slow start, with an intro that borders on self-parody (fluttery classical piano flourishes over a hip hop break -- it's Alicia Keys, everybody!), a couple songs that plod almost as much as "No One," then "No One" itself, then a brief respite from boredom in the great "Like You'll Never See Me Again," and then another dull song, one with John Mayer where she cannibalizes her own "A Woman's Worth." But then As I Am hits a really great middle third, heralded by a trio of songs with the word "love" in the title, starting with "Wreckless Love." As a horn section revs up, she intones "let's take it back a little bit, y'know, it's not that it's not good now," but instead of some nostalgia trip about old R&B or something, it's an incredibly exhilarating song about young love (a sentiment echoed by one of the other best songs on the album, "Teenage Love Affair"). The verses feature a barebones arrangement of twinkling, almost music box-style piano over shuffling drums, and then the chorus is a big swooning wall of harmonies and strings. It's joyous and uplifting in a way that you get the feeling Alicia Keys is always aiming for, but so rarely actually hits.
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on Saturday, December 08, 2007 at 1:26 PM.
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