Alicia Keys: The Element of Freedom
Alicia Keys: The Element of Freedom
Wednesday, 16, Dec 2009 10:19
Jive (Sony), out now.
What's it all about?
Alicia Keys has never written songs which deliberately leap out in controversy - or even demand attention. She simply does her own thing, and knows that the people who get it will get it. Of the twelve songs here, two of them do sound like very deliberate obvious singles. Doesn't Mean Anything is a pale echo of 2007's massive single No-One, and Put it in A Love Song which features Beyonce is already gathering airplay. A mellowed down version of Empire State of Mind without Jay-Z is also included to close off the album on familiar ground. All the usual elements of classic Alicia are present, and while there's nothing likely to compel anyone who isn't already keen, there's also nothing to frighten anyone away, or upset her devoted fanbase.
Who's it by?
Alicia Keys attracted a lot of popular curiosity in 2001 with Fallin', her beautiful debut tale of confused love-hurt inconsistency, and the album Songs in A Minor was book proof of a gorgeous new talent, selling over 6.2 million copies and nabbing Keys five Grammy awards. On her second album The Diary of Alicia Keys, Kanye West himself rolled up his sleeves to pitch in on the production side of things, and the album sold over 618,000 copies in the first week of release (sales have now reached around 8 million), won a 2005 Grammy for Best R 'n' B Album, and was also nominated for Album of the Year. On her third album As I Am, alongside the regular fixture of her beloved Krucial Brothers who helped sculpt Alicia's sound from the start, she worked with John Mayer, Marsha Ambrosius, and even Linda Perry. Despite drawing mixed reviews, As I Am went triple platinum in 2008 and won 3 Grammy Awards.
She also sang the latest Bond theme song last October with Jack White, and currently features on Jay-Z's gigantic single Empire State of Mind.
The making of Keys' fourth studio album, The Element of Freedom, has been overshadowed by the singer's struggles with depression since losing a family member, but if you're expecting an album of dark psychological introspection, you won't find it. The sadder songs are, in typical Keys style, all about nothing more profound than love and sex (and why not?), and any expression of blues is balanced out by rising melodies - and the obligatory thrown in likeable chart-friendly pop songs.
As an example...
"Even if you were a million miles away, I could still feel you in my bed/... and even at the bottom of the sea I can still hear inside my head/And all that time you were telling me lies." - Try Sleeping With A Broken Heart
"All of my friends think I'm crazy for loving you/What they don't know is there's nothing else I can do/And it's too bad, 'cos love is blind." - Love is Blind
What the others say,/b>
"At times, it is like being force fed a bowl of semolina... Keys is the most frustrating of things: a stunning talent who's too happy to give the world more of which it already has a surfeit. Maybe next time she'll push herself further." - Simon Price, Independent
"A confident, well-crafted modern soul record that engages and rewards without doing anything too groundbreaking." - Killian Fox, Observer
So is it any good?
Well, it's true that all the classic Alicia landmarks are definitely still here; the shivering melodies led by sweet little chord shifts, gloriously powerful Gladys Knight-esque vocals, rattling drums, and - often missed as they are buried in amongst some truly infantile expressions of sentiment - occasional flashes of real lyrical honesty.
Predictably, there are a few slapdash quick buck singles, such as the perfectly enjoyable but instantly forgettable Put It In A Love Song where Keys duets with Beyonce, and lovers of mush will be glad to know that there's plenty of wimpy dross on tracks like How It Feels To Fly. Although, it should be noted that even when Alicia Keys does dross, it's still dross with an incredible fire in those vocals.
It's easy to get distracted by the coolest, loudest and most ostentatious songs. Doesn't Mean Anything chugs along steadily in a charmingly non-offensive way, and will probably become the new best friend of radio DJs everywhere - at the sad cost of being despised by everybody else. But a song like This Bed is, though easy to overlook, a thousand times fresher. As Keys squeals her verses, whispers the hook "this bed... is too lonely without you..." then gasps "these king-sized sheets, need more than just a queen, in between them", all over those playful skipping beats, you can't help but hear glaring echoes of Prince. And just so there's no confusion, that's Prince at his absolute best.
Hopes are set high by opening the album with Love is Blind, (which totally ought to be remixed into a massive club track, by the way...), a song which showcases a new, rawer vocal delivery in place of the trademark whispering, moaning, and soft swooping around each note - and yet this grittier-than-usual vocal is curiously softened by delicate harmonies which run tenderly through the whole song. Keys begins the track by spitting "Well, people don't see what I see, even when they're standing right there", and as her lips spitefully curl around the end of the line "and all of my friends think I'm crazy for loving you", she sounds so choked in pain, so wilfully destructive, that you could almost be listening to Amy Winehouse. A far cry from Keys' previous massaging of her love objects' egos with talk of running them bubble baths and admiring their bright cufflinks.
Following it with arguably the most generic track on the album (Doesn't Mean Anything) isn't the greatest of moves - although an awful lot of people are clearly going to love this song, so perhaps Keys just has a lot of commercial awareness as well as a hefty musical gift. Try Sleeping With A Broken Heart follows in a similar vein; familiar plodding beats (including random 80s-sounding gunshots and weird synth machines) coupled with a pretty tumbling piano and a top vocal line perfect for girls everywhere to link arms and sing along while clutching their Bacardi Breezers. There's nothing wrong with it, nor with the next pounding ballad Wait Til They See You Smile (which boasts some splendid harmonies but somehow manages to sound an awful lot like the Band Aid Christmas song, which I'm not convinced is deliberate), but you can't help feeling a little bit aggrieved that Keys' obvious immense levels of talent aren't being stretched anywhere near to their limits.
The remaining songs, with the exception of Put It In A Love Song and This Bed are fairly indistinguishable from one another, and despite soaring vocals and clear, warm melodies, mostly fail to excite much.
The album closes off with a mellow rendition of Empire State of Mind where, in place of Jay-Z's radio-rapping, Alicia is accompanied only by her piano and a final explosion of beats at the end in a rather cheesy but still quite awesome culmination.
As is always the case with Alicia Keys, the glory of each album lies not in any outlandish production, poetic lyrics, pretentious ego posturing or controversial subject matters, but instead lies in the beauty of simple but delightful chord changes, subtle, pretty melodies which trickle through the skin like syrup, and - obviously - an impeccable voice. These are not songs manipulated out of a computer during a studio session. They are songs written by a serious pianist who loves her soul giants and has a genuine feel for real R 'n' B (that is, not the kind that was invented by the Neptunes and Timbaland, giving girls in clubs an excuse to dance like they're in a soft porn film, but rather, the kind that was invented by Holland-Dozier-Holland and formed an undercurrent to the civil rights movement).
After three albums enormously successful albums, Keys could have, and perhaps should have, pushed the musical boundaries a lot further than she does on this offering. She still sings lyrics without much suggestion of original emotion or any fresh take on love, and she still uses beat formations that have been tried, tested, bought, sold, and run into the ground by the likes of Ne-Yo. But she also still has possibly the best voice in modern soul music, is surely the best pianist in the genre (with the possible exception of the, ahem, legendary John Legend), and is still one of the most honest and down to earth musicians - not just in her musical adherence to sweet melodies instead of guttural mutterings of filth and endless gyrating, but also in her charitable work with projects such as Keep a Child Alive. Maybe she doesn't spill every specific detail of her life into every record, but if that means we get an album that at least tries to focus on the music rather than the artist's OK magazine personality and dress size, perhaps this is something a genre founded on raw emotion and being 'real' should embrace and encourage.
7.5/10
Louise McCudden