CD reviews: R. Kelly, OneRepublic

R. Kelly, "Untitled" (Jive)

Call it focus, call it obsession, call it tunnel vision, call it formula: Kelly is consistent. Album after album he provides single-minded, slow-grinding songs about sex. After singing about pickups, hookups, bedroom marathons, kinks, menages, even a stray midget, what variations could be left for his 10th studio album? Well, there's yodeling. That's in "Echo," a ballad with tremulous strings in which he demonstrates how his lover should "scream and moan."

Kelly does get out of the bedroom every so often. The other main locale on "Untitled" is, as usual, the club, where he parades his success, endorses brand-name booze, picks up new partners and, in a house-tinged track, proclaims "I Love the DJ." He fuses sex with his musical career in "Like I Do" and in "Number One," a duet with Keri Hilson that equates hit-making and lovemaking. Even a routine R. Kelly song outshines much of the competition. In "Religious," he returns to his gospel-y ballad side; this time he testifies to the compassion and boundless patience of a woman who has made him "repent and change my thuggish ways." He also abandons his robo-lothario mode for "Elsewhere," a ballad about the end of a romance. It starts with a lone piano and turns orchestral, as a sobbing Kelly watches her leave, broods with wounded jealousy about her making a new start and then, in the bridge, decides to go after her. It's lachrymose, melodramatic and somehow touching anyway. Cheesy as he can be, Kelly still knows how to get a response.

JON PARELES, NEW YORK TIMES

OneRepublic, "Waking Up" (Interscope)

Like many sophomore efforts, OneRepublic's second album wrestles with fame, which would make more sense if OneRepublic were, you know, famous. Granted, "Apologize," the group's first single, stayed in the Top 10 of the Billboard singles chart for almost half a year. And OneRepublic's frontman and primary songwriter, Ryan Tedder, has helped to write gargantuan hits for Kelly Clarkson ("Already Gone"), Leona Lewis ("Bleeding Love") and Beyoncé ("Halo"). But all of these songs suffer from the same malaise: They stay on an even plane -- a morbid one, at that -- as if gestating. Dynamic singers can sometimes rescue them, but Tedder can't. "Apologize," for all its melodic acuity, is emotionally flat. And throughout "Waking Up" it sounds as if Tedder were dragging his gelatinous voice in the directions he needs it to go but that it isn't naturally capable of. Worse, on this album OneRepublic is a group of dreary technicians banging out modern-rock homework assignments: the blatant flourishes of U2-esque yearning on "Made for You," the listless Britpop shifts of "Marchin On." More successfully, there's "Secrets," which ruthlessly pilfers Coldplay's damp atmospherics and sense of self-importance.