Alicia Keys

Reviews

As I Am (RCA)

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Reviewed by Andy Gill

As I Am, when heard back-to-back with Britney Spears' Blackout, offers the most tragic comparison I've experienced this year. Both are former stage-school pupils from less than salubrious neighbourhoods, but their careers seem to be following diametrically opposed trajectories.

On the one hand, there's a typical child-star casualty, catastrophically damaged by a life in showbiz, desperately trying to justify aberrant behaviour bordering on self-harm; on the other, an assured, professional performer so in control of her life and career that she probably has the years 2025 to 2030 already earmarked for her presidential campaign.

It's certainly hard to envisage Alicia Keys plummeting into the kind of tabloid-fodder tailspin habitually afflicting Spears. For one thing, she simply wouldn't have the time: a nine-time Grammy winner adept at both classical and pop forms, a published poet, and an untiring philanthropist and campaigner on behalf of African Aids awareness, she's recently added a burgeoning movie career to her bulging creative armoury, with several acting roles soon to be followed by the first production from her television company, a coming-of-age comedy-drama about a bi-racial teenager, based on her own life. Oh, and in her spare moments, Keys also makes the occasional album.

To be honest, though, I wish she'd spend rather more time on her music and less on all the extra-curricular distractions, as there are too many moments on As I Am when, for all Keys' apparent emotional involvement, she seems to be freewheeling through the songs. "Lesson Learned", her duet with John Mayer, is a main offender, lacking definition and sounding far too businesslike an alliance; "I Need You" is ruined by a comprehensively over-egged arrangement; and apt though it may be in her case, the assertive "Superwoman" is a bland plodder just about salvaged by Keys' persuasive delivery.

But it would be churlish to allow such lapses to overshadow the album's good points, which range from the anthemic single "No One" to the title-track, which harnesses her romantic piano style to a punchy hip-hop drum programme. Other highlights include her paean to spicy lovemaking "Wreckless Love", featuring a Jack Splash production blending his jazzy drum shuffle with horn and string arrangements reminiscent of Curtis Mayfield, and "Teenage Love Affair", on which she seems to summon up the ghost of that earlier pioneer of sophisticated Big Apple soul, Laura Nyro.

Download this: 'Wreckless Love', 'Teenage Love Affair', 'No One', 'Go Ahead'