I am a huge fan of Mariah’s voice but after being slightly disappointed with her last album E=MC2 and slightly annoyed with the single Obsessed I didn’t plan on buying this album. After a couple of suggestions and someone hand delivering me the album I figured it couldn’t hurt to give it a listen.
The first song that grabbed my attention was Inseparable, it has a decent mid tempo track and the lyrics are something I can relate to. I think we all know how it feels to break up with someone or have a huge fight and if one of you would just pick up the phone and call the other things could go back to being blissful. I am still on the fence about whether it stood out to me because this was the one song I didn’t skip when I started the CD or if I truly love this song.
A song that I’m clear how I feel about it is It’s a Wrap, the title is self explanatory and it’s a perfect break up song for that special someone that you have told repeatedly they had one more time to mess up. I loved the getupouttamyhouse attitude of the song felt this worked well. I found another sassy “we’re through” song on the albumUp Out My Face, the issue I have with the song is I’m not sure if the chorus gels with the song. To be perfectly honest I felt it was beneath Mariah, it seemed more like this was a song she could have passed off to an up and comer or a more vocally challenged female artist or even girl group.
More Than Just Friends would have been a tight Summertime single and in my opinion should have maybe been the single dropped instead of Obsessed. I would say this is easily my favorite song off the album by a landslide. It has a versatile vibe I could hear this is in the club or just cruising. She covered the Foreigners classic I Want To Know What Love Is which happens to be one of my favorite songs of all times. I felt she did it justice, she didn’t add anything special to it nor take anything away from it. There are a couple of other songs are actually starting to grow on me H.A.T.E.U and Standing O. This is one of those albums I had to listen to a few times to really get into it. I just didn’t feel like it was better than The Emancipation of MiMi, in fact it felt like a part two of the last album. I am a huge abuser of the Genius feature on iTunes. After every Mariah song off this album genius would play a song from her last album I found that ironic.
I really love Mariah and think she is an amazing talent but I felt I was shortchanged from experiencing any new MiMi Magic. On one hand I am glad she didn’t go overboard with the high notes, in fact I think I only heard it twice. But, on the other hand I felt she chose to sing average which for any other artist would probably be acceptable but coming from Mariah, no thank you. This song was blatantly missing a classic Mariah ballad which was a let down for me personally.
I know she worked with The Dream and Tricky Stewart for the entire album but maybe that was her biggest mistake. Don’t get me wrong a few songs with them would have been fine. I think Tricky is a decent producer and no doubt The Dream can write hits, but there were a couple songs I swear all I could hear was The Dream singing and I could have seriously done without that. I don’t feel like they created any magic in the studio together and I wasn’t impressed by most of the otherwise very elementary lyrics. I think if she stuck with her usual mix of JD formulated hits and maybe sprinkle it with some Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis this would have been a classic album. However, it’s Mariah and people will still buy it. Overall I give it 3 stars out of 5.