3 stars (out of 4)

Wearing a suit and bow tie, his head thrown back in sepia-toned ecstasy, R. Kelly evokes an old-school soul man on the cover of his 10th studio album, “Love Letter” (Jive).

It’s an unlikely look for Kelly, who has spent the last two decades churning out libido-on-overdrive odes to his twin muses: the bump and the grind. That tunnel vision has served him well, a quadruple threat singer-songwriter-producer-performer who has racked up 34 million sales.

Though he has also dabbled in self-empowerment anthems (“I Believe I Can Fly”) and his childhood love of Chicago-style dusties soul (“Step in the Name of Love”), “Love Letter” marks the first time he’s gone nearly an entire album sounding almost chaste. This is Kelly at his most earnest, reimagining the music that dominated his household while growing up on Chicago’s South Side in the ‘70s and ‘80s.  

“I wanna bring the love songs back to the radio,” he sings on “Lost in Your Love,” and serves up a series of tributes to heroes past, a personal tour of soul history. He invokes Sade in the sensual sway of “Number One Hit”; channels Michael Jackson’s keening cries on “Not Feelin’ the Love”; the doo-wop of the Dells and Spaniels on “Radio Message,” right down to its a cappella finale; a Motown-style co-ed duet with K. Michelle on “Love Is”; Sam Cooke’s bring-it-on-home-to-me empathy on “How Do I Tell Her”; and the pleading desperation of Percy Sledge on “When A Woman Loves.”

He nods to the Marvin Gaye of “Let’s Get it On” as an obvious carnal influence in “Just Can’t Get Enough,” and veers into Kelly freak mode on “Taxi.” But for the most part Kelly forgoes the sing-songy minimalism that made him rich in favor of more developed melodies, fully orchestrated arrangements and lyrics that are as much spiritual as sexual.

Some listeners may question Kelly’s sincerity. His career has been built on  over-the-top outrageousness, so how to buy Kelly as a suave soul crooner? The singer is nearly as well known for his legal troubles (he was acquitted of child pornography in 2008) as for his music.

Yet “Love Letter” is perhaps the most personal work of his career. These are the type of songs he’d sing when performing for pocket change on Chicago street corners and L platforms before he had a record deal. This style of music also meant everything to his late mother, whose record collection set Kelly on his path. “Love Letter” is as much an homage to her as it to the classic soul tracks she loved.

greg@gregkot.com  

Rating: 2.5 stars (out of 4)

When Usher Raymond began his career in the mid-‘90s, he was still a teenager celebrated as much for his athletic dance moves as the pick-up lines in his frisky R&B; songs. He sold millions of records by passing himself off as a less-threatening R. Kelly, a coltish crooner with a humming libido and A-list producers. His biggest hit, the 2004 Lil’ Jon crunk-pop confection “Yeah,” firmed up Usher’s club-trolling persona.

On the 2008 release, “Here I Stand,” he shifted gears, with an emphasis on ballads reflecting his newfound status as a husband and father. The album flopped, at least by his multimillion-selling standards, and his marriage collapsed. Two years later he’s back with his sixth album, “Raymond v Raymond” (LaFace), and it’s back to business as usual: More songs about “So Many Girls” and the burden of being a “Pro Lover” on the prowl.

“Daddy’s home,” Usher announces, as if returning from the exile of domesticity. But the songs brimming with booty calls (“ain’t nobody do your body like this”) are starting to sound a bit stale on the 31-year-old singer. Similarly, the production choices fall short: will.i.am offers another formulaic chant (“OMG”) tricked out with Auto-Tune. Sean Garrett’s “She Don’t Know” recycles “Yeah,” and then compounds Usher’s problems when Ludacris’ cameo rap upstages the star. Similarly, T.I. hi-jacks “Guilty” with a rapid-fire guest spot.

The boilerplate swagger is balanced by the falsetto sweetness of “There Goes My Baby.” And a couple of songs actually live up to the promise of the album title and its suggestion of a more emotionally complex Usher. “Foolin’ Around” delivers a straying husband’s mea culpa, only to see his marriage end in tears and “Papers.” It’s the kind of lacerating perspective that adulthood brings, but Usher’s too busy chasing his past to fully embrace it.

greg@gregkot.com

Sponsored Link: Amazon's Usher Store

    Alicia Keys is a bit too down to earth to fit in with the brigade of pop divas who have dominated the charts in the last decade: Beyonce, Mariah Carey, Christina Aguilera. But she has more of a glamor quotient than singer-songwriter peers such as Norah Jones and Corinne Bailey Rae.

    She’s an accomplished pianist and songwriter who has racked up four multimillion-selling albums in a row, including her latest, “The Element of Freedom” (RCA). And she’s popular enough to headline arenas, as she will Wednesday at Allstate Arena. It didn’t hurt that her label spent millions breaking her debut album; such is life when you’re anointed by Clive Davis. But to Keys’ credit, she’s backed up the hype with credible (if not transcendent) music.

      Keys owes more to ‘70s soul, with its premium on sophisticated musicality, than modern R&B, with its emphasis on gimmicky hooks. But she’s comfortable in both worlds, a 29-year-old old-school soul acolyte whose productions have enough hip-hop pop in them to compete with Lady Gaga and R. Kelly for chart space.

Rating: 2 stars (out of 4)

   It’s tempting to read into the title of R. Kelly’s first album since his acquittal on child-pornography charges last year. Is his 10th studio album since the early ‘90s called “Untitled” because Kelly wants to wipe the slate clean? Could it be the sign of a new beginning? An invitation to hear the artist from a fresh perspective?

    Not even close.

    “Untitled” (Jive) is business as usual in the candle-lit, silk-sheeted house of Kelly, which means, “sex in the morning, sex all day.”

    And business is good. Even under a cloud of legal suspicion for six years, Kelly continued to sing about booty calls and sell millions of albums. As the most dominant producer-songwriter-singer in R&B; the last two decades, the south suburban resident married a sparse, sing-songy sound and salacious subject matter into a signature style that has made him a star.

    Most listeners who pay attention to pop music have already made up their minds about Kelly. “Untitled” won’t change anyone’s perspective. It’s more a reminder, as he modestly crows in “Like I Do,” that when it comes to lust and music he “blow[s] the competition away.”

    Who needs poetry? “Sex is like dope to me” – how’s that for simile? Most of the time Kelly just lets it bump and grind without filtering: “Ba-ba-bangin’ the headboard … squeakin’ the bed”; “I wanna be sippin’ on your sweet, sweet water”; “Drip, drip, drip with the candle wax”; “And a wooo and a weee.”
   
    Kelly is the latest in a long line of R&B; bedroom maestros. The Dominoes’ “Sixty Minute Man,” Hank Ballard’s “Work with Me, Annie” and Etta James’ “Roll With Me, Henry,” were explicit odes to carnality from the Truman and Eisenhower eras. In later decades, the likes of Millie Jackson, Marvin Sease and Prince took turns out-raunching each other.

    It could be argued that Kelly’s brand of lewdness stands in a class by itself because he was accused of a sex crime and yet continued to make millions singing about bedroom escapades. Nonetheless, fans kept buying his records, and radio stations kept playing them. Unlike Michael Jackson, who retreated from public view when sex allegations buffeted him, Kelly just kept on writing, recording and producing music at a prolific rate.  

    Now that he’s been acquitted, the singer doesn’t do any victory dances or play any victim cards on “Untitled.” His only vindictive comment arrives almost as an afterthought as the track “Be My #2” winds down. “And to all you hatin’ [expletive]: Slap, slap, slap, slap,” he chirps.

    He’s otherwise too busy getting busy. Though the lyrics work minor variations on smut, the voice is another matter entirely. It is pleading and needy, and yet manages to wink at itself. At other times, his tone verges on desperation, as if sex is more essential than oxygen. He massages simple (and sometimes simplistic) words into hooks through phrasing that is pliant, inventive, audacious, sometimes silly. He even yodels on “Echo,” and improbably it works -- as radio candy if not enduring musical art.

        That ardor is framed by music that is everything his lyrics are not: subtle, ornate, at times downright refined. As a producer and arranger, he is meticulous with detail, orchestrating hand claps, finger snaps and drum machines to create just the right rhythm backdrop for an evening of “wooo and weee.” Strings, guitars and keyboards add color in carefully measured doses. The songs never develop much beyond their initial verse and chorus and rarely bother with contrasting bridge sections, but that’s the point: No jarring changes to throw off the mood. Little wonder he does so many medleys in concert; even Kelly realizes that many of his songs have limited durability outside the bedroom.
       
        About halfway through the album, the singer expands his sound by working with a few relative newcomers. The Danish producers Soulshock and Karlin bring a Euro-disco beat to “I Love the DJ,” Atlanta rapper OJ Da Juiceman adds “Dirty South” hip-hop crunch to “Supaman High” and producer Jack Splash salts “Be My #2” with dance beats and sun-splashed horns. It’s too bad he didn’t go further with these experiments, which freshen Kelly’s increasingly predictable sound and perk up the bedroom tempos.
       
        As he usually does, the singer tosses in a couple of songs that hint at a more introspective side, that suggest he views women as something more than just sex partners to shoo away in the morning. “Religious” sings the praises of an unjustly scorned companion, over gospel piano and organ (naturally, the woman in question “reminds me of my mother” – a recurring theme in Kelly’s work when he wants to get serious). On “Elsewhere,” the narrator positively trembles with regret over a failed relationship.
       
        But at album’s end, Kelly snaps out of it.
       
        “She’s more than a mistress,” he purrs on “Pregnant.” “I’m gonna put that girl in my kitchen.”
       
        Back on the prowl, same as it ever was. Who needs album titles?
       
        greg@gregkot.com    

Sponsored Link: Amazon's R. Kelly Store

  R. Kelly in Chicago. (Tribune photo by Chris Sweda)

   In his first hometown concert after being acquitted last year on child-pornography charges, R. Kelly was in a hurry to move on.

    Before a capacity audience Tuesday in the first of two shows at the Auditorium Theatre, the South Side R&B singer-songwriter-producer-performer tried to pack two decades’ worth of hits into 90 minutes. In the first quarter-hour alone, he crammed snippets of a dozen songs, plus a bit of Kanye West’s “Flashing Lights.”

        It was probably just as well. Many of Kelly’s songs are more about simple hooks and salacious lyrics rather than intricate structure, and a verse and a chorus is about all anyone needs to get the idea.

        The pace slowed after that, but only slightly, as Kelly made like a man on a mission, only pausing once to obliquely mention his acquittal after a six-year legal proceeding

    “I’m still here,” he cried, but his tone was less triumphant or vindictive than grateful. He then swooped into his signature ballad, “I Believe I Can Fly,” which he described as his response to “somebody continuously trying to pull you under.”

    “Never would have made it without you,” he said midsong, addressing the audience. “My house, my kids, my family, my band. I would have lost it all.”

     Up until then, Kelly was working the audience like a yo-yo, interspersing monologues and lyrics, his voice conversational even in full flight. Asides became choruses, and instructions to his road crew became impromptu songs. A request to have a carpet removed from the set inspired Kelly to sing as though in the grip of a higher power. He accentuated the humor in his bedroom farces by breaking into an operatic baritone roar. All that was missing was a Cliff Notes version of his 22-part sex-and-soap opera “Trapped in the Closet.”

    He was lean, athletic, dressed down in jeans and a T-shirt even as bling gleamed from his wrist, earlobes and neck. He performed with a smile and a slight leer, his eyes gleaming with mischief when he dropped his sunglasses.

        “Have you ever made love to my music?” he asked, like a sharp attorney already knowing the response from his witnesses.

        Sing-songy nursery-rhyme cadences gave the songs a playful, almost child-like veneer, couching soft-core porn lyrics. In Kelly’s songs, sex contains multitudes of scenarios, positions, partners, metaphors. Kelly played the fans like an instrument, clasping hands, collecting panties, conducting sing-alongs.

    A five-piece band, three singers, three dancers and an MC performed with anonymous professionalism. They were strictly a backdrop for Kelly’s extended tryst with his mostly female audience, which stood and cheered for most of the show.

    “Let’s just keep it old school,” Kelly commanded his band, which meant little more than the sizzle of a hi-hat cymbal and a drizzle of keyboards. Kelly’s arrangements emphasized a lean simplicity and he wasted no time getting to the point in his lyrics either.
       
       His ardor -- sincere, humorous, over-the-top --- couldn’t be denied. He conjured a weird intimacy, the truncated songs turning into the soundtrack for an extended round of foreplay between the singer and his fans: “Na-na … boom-ba … don’t stop … so freaky … G-string … hotel keys.” 
       
        After simulating love-making 700 different ways, even Kelly needed a break, and wisely shifted gears.
       
        He explored some of the darker edges of his material in “Down Low” and “When a Woman’s Fed Up,” and donned a black suit to belt out credible versions of Sam Cooke’s classic soul tracks “Bring it On Home to Me” and “A Change is Gonna Come.”

    “A change has come,” Kelly concluded, before slipping into the elegant dance songs “Step in the Name of Love” and “Happy People.” They weren’t reduced to snippets. They’re ungimmicky songs, and Kelly let them breathe a bit. Then he was out the door while the bed he had made was still warm.

    greg@gregkot.com

Sponsored Link: Amazon's R. Kelly Store