Carey sounds like gold on "Charmbracelet"
There's no mistaking that rippling purr at the beginning of Mariah Carey's Through the Rain, the lead single from her new album, Charmbracelet. It's the voice that launched a thousand junior divas. However you feel about Carey or her music, it's impossible to deny the impact her vocal style, a florid blend of breathy riffing and resonant belting, has had on today's young pop and R&B stars. It's impossible to imagine how Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, Beyoncé Knowles or any of the female contestants on American Idol would sound in a Carey-less world.
At 32, Carey is a 12-year chart veteran. And although she may not look grizzled, the songs on her new CD reveal, for anyone who hasn't picked up a tabloid lately, that experience has provided a few tough lessons. Yet Charmbracelet is no post-breakdown self-pity party. True to fashion, Carey has taken lemons and made lemonade, heavy on the sugar. There is more of a tartness to her new fare, though, suggesting that although hard times may not have clipped Carey's butterfly wings, they have grounded her.
Rain, the first track, is an unabashedly sentimental bolero that recalls Carey's early-'90s hit Hero. But as a whole, Charmbracelet is less a calculated return to Carey's roots than a reflection on her musical and personal evolution, and a promise that it will continue. The girlish sass that has long been a hallmark of her up-tempo songs is evident on breezy tracks such as Boy and the rap-kissed You Got Me.
Elsewhere, though, Carey makes a concerted effort to project more maturity and sophistication. The jazz-inflected Subtle Invitation wouldn't sound out of place on an Anita Baker album, and the elegantly wistful I Only Wanted and sharp-witted Clown evoke deeper conviction - and melancholy - than previous hits. Carey may not have lost the preternatural peppiness that always has driven her flamboyant singing. But her vision of love has seldom seemed so hard-won or firmly rooted. (USA Today)
|
