Arista
Urban Contemporary, 2008

I was a fan of Jennifer Hudson during her run on American Idol and I couldn’t be happier when she won those movie awards and made a name for herself. I was looking forward to Jennifer Hudson, but I confess that I am disappointed by it at the end of the day.

The problem with this CD is that there are too many songs that are more slow burn in nature than instantaneously catchy hits. If This is Love (easily the best track here), Pocketbook, and Can’t Stop the Rain are three out of fifteen tracks here that are fun, catchy, and infectious. The rest, however, are either generic overproduced songs that sound like everything else on the charts at the moment or ambitious self-indulgent exercises in Aretha Franklin-style vocal acrobatics in a hope to repeat the success she had with And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going. Even her duet with Fantasia, I’m His Only Woman, doesn’t catch fire as much as I’d hoped.

Still, it’s okay. I still adore Ms Hudson. Still, she can come up with a better follow-up than this rather forgettable mix of ho-hum tunes, surely?