Motown
Urban Contemporary, 2002
Eh, what time is it now? I think I fell asleep while listening to India.Arie’s follow up to her marvelous Acoustic Soul. In this follow-up, she has abandoned the guitar in favor of slickly produced tracks – maybe she’s still annoyed about losing the Grammy to Alicia Keys, and comes up with this dull effort as payback. Either way, it’s as dull as dishwater.
The lyrics are the usual soul-searching, love, peace, harmony type, and I like the romanticism of tracks like The Truth and Beautiful Surprise. Indeed, reading the lyrics on the CD booklet makes a far more enjoyable experience, but not with the CD playing like I did, because you’ll fall asleep and drool on the CD booklet and all those pages will be ruined. I love this lady’s wordsmith – she comes off as genuine and sincere in pieces like God Is Real when at the hands of anybody else, it may be seen as some crazy evangelist new age kook thing.
It’s just too bad all her poetry and lyricism is wasted on middling, hook-free tracks that barely register on my memory. The whole album is like one overlong, too slow ballad that never ends no matter what. I’d rather be reading the CD booklet.
