R&B
Keyshia Cole, "Woman to Woman" (Geffen)
Cole's fifth album is an R&B almanac of shaky romance, narratives with gnarled details, endlessly recombining data about suspicion, jealousy, pride, punishment, self-respect, the lead-up, the aftermath.
The happiness shows up in "Wonderland," a duet with Elijah Blake, and "Hey Sexy," a sly and generous song. But they seem like patch-ins from other records. "Woman to Woman" is for the anxious stat-crunchers of emotional sport, those marking up their box scores instead of watching the game.
The first half of the CD presents different aspects of what a woman thinks during the period between the first suspicion of malfeasance and the end of, say, the first month of living alone. In the title track she confronts the other woman, played by Ashanti; it seems that they both have a legitimate claim on the same guy. The song has no solution.
The breakups in these songs are never clean and heroic. These guys stay around, in the narrators' minds, in their lives, and the narrators aren't blameless, either. They're often changing their minds and pitting their real desires against what they allow themselves to say. Occasionally the inner self is more alluring than the outer one, as on "Next Move," a standoff between a woman and a man (played by the singer Robin Thicke).
Here's another question that might have no solution: Why does a real-talk album sound so ironed? I don't so much mean the production, with some feckless guest verses by Lil Wayne and Meek Mill. I mean Cole herself. Why is her big-voiced delivery so similar and balanced in nearly every song?
BEN RATLIFF, NEW YORK TIMES
POP/ROCK
Lana Del Rey, "Paradise" (Interscope)
