When she debuted in 2001, the then-20-year-old New Yorker Alicia Keys had a soulfulness well beyond her years, an authoritative piano style that recalled gospel churches in Harlem as much as it did Tchaikovsky and Chopin, an earthy, street-accented, dark-chocolate contralto and an unusually acute emotional understanding of what gave old-school soul records (by Marvin, Stevie and Reverend Al) their magic.
‘Fallin’’, her debut single, was the female answer to James Brown’s ‘It’s A Man’s, Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World’, featuring, most arrestingly, an absolute Aretha of a vocal performance: from the melodrama of its wailing violins to its steady piano and foreboding backing vocals, it was flawless. Subsequent singles helped debut LP Songs In A Minor win five Grammys and sell 10 million copies.
So why change a precocious, unique ingenue’s winning formula? Who knows – but that’s what’s happened. Falling between several stools – its R’n’B tracks not cutting-edge enough, its soul-jazz too polished, its songwriting veering far too close to bog-standard complaint’n’B – Diary… delivers on neither her tremendous potential as a soul artist, nor her huge gift as a soul-pop star.
There are exceptions, namely the gorgeous Stevie Wonderish psych-jazz blissouts of ‘Feeling U, Feeling Me’ and ‘Nobody Not Really’; and the Timbaland-produced ‘Heartburn’ (half ‘Theme From Shaft’, half James Brown’s ‘It’s Your Thing’) is excellent, even if it is, frankly, the kind of pop’n’B battery-farmed out to artists by hot producers these days, singable by anyone.
The standout is ‘You Don’t Know My Name’, with its sighing, blissful What’s Going On strings and down-home, girl-from-the-neighbourhood sweetness.
Bit of a disappointment, isn’t it?