Word: albums
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...album is the kind of galvanizing work neo-soul needs: unabashedly personal, unrelentingly confrontational, uncommonly inventive...
...might well expect a record by a teenage pop singer to be overly emotional, earnest, bursting with hormonal passions. But 17-year-old Britney Spears' first album feels like the opposite of adolescence: the songs are mostly slick and remote, steering away from anything that's too deeply felt. The title track is cuddly, though, and already a hit single. A few of her songs, including the pleasantly modern ballad E-Mail My Heart, indeed deliver a sugar high, and may well win over the very same crowd that goes for tot-pop acts like the Spice Girls and Brandy...
...Shakur by the hip-hop press, the performer DMX has one of the better voices in rap: low, raw, charismatic. In fact, one could say he sounds like a cross between Barry White and McGruff the Crime Dog. However, DMX doesn't share McGruff's anticrime leanings: his new album, like his last, which went double platinum, is seething with viciousness and violence. His lyrics--often simple and clumsy--attack other black people, homosexuals and women. DMX is at his best when he becomes more contemplative, as he does in Coming From, a moving ballad he performs with singer Mary...
...HEPCAT Right on Time (Hellcat) This nine-member band, based in Los Angeles, plays old-school ska with sweet vocals and warm, gentle horns. The songs, many of them genial ballads and jazzy instrumentals, breeze by, carefree but never insubstantial. This is an album that makes you dream of the Caribbean, or of dancing under starlight, or perhaps both...
...DANILO PEREZ Central Avenue (Impulse) Perez, a pianist, is after a kind of musical Creole, mixing straight-ahead bop with motifs from Cuba, Brazil and his native Panama--all at once! Central Avenue may not be the year's most coherent album, but it's emblematic of the new, more supple, more eclectic brand of fusion that's enriching jazz...