Mariah Belts the Ballads

Jan 20

AndrewMusic , Comments Off

A whole album of Mariah Carey ballads? Sounds like heaven, right?

Well sort of. Undeniably, this is another greatest hits set even if it doesn’t say so on the label. (She’s already produced two, #1′s in 1998 and Greatest Hits in 2001). The songs on The Ballads have dominated radio since 1990′s Vision of Love, and been well represented on past hits collections. This time around, there is a new mix of Hero to lead off the set, a duet with Whitney Houston (When you Believe), Boyz II Men (One Sweet Day) and Usher (How Much). Joe and Nas take a crack at a sluggish, kind of boring version of Thank God I Found You. And the rest of the tracks are overfull with the soaring vocal gyrations we know and love from Mariah Carey.

Thank God for the duets (though the U.S. edition is missing the Westlife duet Against All Odds but includes Mariah’s take with Luther Vandross of Endless Love) because without them, this is actually too much ballad. Mariah’s voice dominates the entire disc and without a dance tune or suggestively sexed-up track to interrupt the flow of love songs, it starts to drag quickly. You wouldn’t think so, but after about 5 tracks, this starts to sound more like elevator music than a set of iconic ballads from the foremost queen of them (sorry Whitney, but that’s just how it is).

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Possibly the hands-down most attractive track is One Sweet Day, but there’s a lot of love to go around. (But why not include All I Want for Christmas Is You on the U.S. version!) But the downfall of The Ballads is the lack of energy to carry you through 18 tracks. It’s not until you survive to the tail end that you get some more uptempo tunes like Always Be My Baby (heavenly!) and the Spanish-tinged How Much.

It’s not really a hit or miss affair, it really is just ‘hits’ but I can’t help thinking that this effort seems a little lackluster, and is entirely unrepresentative of Mariah’s music career. Individually, all the tracks included here are divine, but taken together, they fall just short of heaven.

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