R&B

Mary J. Blige, "Stronger With Each Tear" (Matriarch/Geffen)

The standout on Blige's ninth studio album is its final song, "I Can See in Color," from the soundtrack of "Precious." It restates Blige's favorite message -- that tribulation is the beginning of redemption -- in an emphatically unadorned minor-key soul setting. The song is the culmination of an album on which Blige straps herself into the contemporary R&B machine, then grapples her way out. Like her fellow R&B songwriters, Blige regularly shops for tracks among the producers and collaborators du jour. On this album they include Akon, Ryan Leslie, Polow da Don, Tricky and the-Dream, and Ne-Yo.

Her chosen producers are masters of what might be called algorithm-and-blues: crisply digitized grids of beats and hooks. The arrangements are often supremely clever, but the songs can also be busy and bloodless, and they're built for adequate voices, not commanding ones. Often they tend to treat vocals as one more neatly placed sound effect. That can happen even to a singer as vivid as Blige. She could be just about anyone on the album's first single, "The One," a ping-ponging, syncopated Rodney Jerkins production that features 2009's omnipresent guest rapper-singer, Drake.

Through the album Blige sings, as usual, about hard-won self-esteem. And like her previous album, "Growing Pains," this one has another recurring subject: the uncertainty of long-term love, weighing fleeting temptations against the satisfactions of staying together. Song by song the album reveals more of her tangy, impassioned voice: first in a phrase or two to ornament an electronic hook, and gradually in longer lines and whole melodic verses. By the end -- with actual piano, strings and horns in a song about marital tensions, "In the Morning," and then in "I Can See in Color" -- Blige has traded virtual sounds for hand-played ones. It's as if she has left behind the flashing lights and makeup of a flirtatious night out and has come home to be heartfelt.

JON PARELES, NEW YORK TIMES

Robin Thicke, "Sex Therapy: The Session" (Star Trak/Interscope)

This is his babymaking album, and although Thicke's freak flag is PG-13, his new randiness adds zip to an always-perfect falsetto. On the crackling soul jam "Mrs. Sexy," he's promising to "buy you a ring and make you Mrs. Sexy," presumably because his bachelorhood as Mr. Sexy was unfulfilling. "Make U Love Me" makes fine use of Neptunes-ish brittle synths and a ping-ponging bass line, and his moaning-Brigitte-Bardot sample on "Meiple" is so over the top it could make Serge Gainsbourg feel outdone.

Thicke fares less well competing with radio's harder fare: the club banger "Shakin' It 4 Daddy" is déclassé by his standards, and his Ne-Yo-leaning disco number "Rollacoasta" is a touch decarbonated.

AUGUST BROWN, LOS ANGELES TIMES