To announce that 'The Diary of Alicia Keys' is a "must have" R&B album -- for voice, lyrics, Alicia's piano playing and a fine backing line-up -- comes behind the times. Part of the truest, non-hype comment already on the Net says:
"Alicia Keys’ artistic light is so bright it could illuminate a pitch-black room. A true musical prodigy whose multi-dimensional gifts emerged at age five, the beautiful Alicia (home site)Songs in A minor'] (AllPerson.com)
You can't catch 'em all straight away and other people's stars can be worth waiting to rejoice at yourself. Alicia's Dec 2003 album -- more soon now please! -- flew me so far out of yuckdom* today that being accosted on the street by a face I'm usually delighted to see felt like a very unwanted intrusion.
The only duff note came off-disc rom one Jake Barnes:
"In truth this fine talent is being plucked too early. At 20 she's hardly lived enough life to find herself."
Jake's almost memorably silly lines were for those fine début 'Songs' (June 2001, at Amazon UK). Without bothering to wonder just where Barnes spent his own first 19 or 20 years, he tops my ridiculous remarks of the month list for laying down the law on when self-discovery begins, while managing to include more than a dozen other artists as comparisons with Keys in a short review that tells us plenty about Jake and little about Alicia.
Sorry to single out the buffoon, who may do better elsewhere, but that's a first-rate example of exactly how not to write a music review, especially when it comes to a new VoW.
If it's surprises you like, take Alice Muson and the luck of having an iTMS, at least in France, adventurous enough to win you over to a magnificent-voiced Atlanta 'Ghost Girl' -- 'Creative Loafing' looks like her local paper as well as a nice way of passing time.
A halfway decent review of 'Passion and Control' (2000), which is unavailable, through some incomprehensible oversight, on any Amazon site I've checked out may come, I hope, once I know more about the mysterious Alice, who is at least at 'Bandlink'.
A casual first listen to gifted Georgia folk and the voice up front told me "this girl is good. Very good."
But once well past 'Chemical Imbalance' and more intimate song-writing like a kind of 'Black-eyed Susan' you don't often hear about on CDs, Alice takes up a solo guitar and sits down to ask "Do you believe me when I tell you ... tell you ... tell you ... that I was wearing 'No Disguise'?"
Once she's done you go back to track one and listen all through 'Passion and Control' again ... and again.
The voice is young, rich in range, and Alice Muson knew, Jake, a whole lot of memorable, poignant and occasionally very catchy things she can't possibly have managed on her own. After all, she doesn't strike my ear as close enough to 20 in 2000 to really have got a life, at least according to Barnes.
The band are cool country folk, but listed by the iTMS as "alternative" and for once the label suits the eclectic content. If anyone passing by knows more about Alice, do tell.
Her own sites are down, though still listed on the search engines. I hope she isn't, since 'Passion and Control' -- if you can find it -- is recommended to anybody looking for a woman who deserves to be right on the up and on the map. Maybe not -- yet -- a "must have", but a songster who, as another of her titles says, is 'High Enough' to take you from out of where you are to where you'd like to be. In great company.
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As for the "yuckdom, forget it! I'm trying to. And feel slightly mean only at the thought there's a bank "advisor" somewhere who might have nightmares now, starring me. Consolation: his dreams can't be any worse than the earful he got from me today. That saga has got beyond a joke.
10:23:51 PM link 
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