Houston tries to put hard times behind her

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Whitney Houston hasn’t released an album in seven years. During that time, a whole generation of listeners came to know her as the tabloid figure hell-bent on heading straight down the tubes before the prying eyes of millions.

For folks weaned on Beyonce, Black Eyed Peas and Lady GaGa, Houston is that woman who used to sing, and is now a beaten-down victim of bad love and worse drugs. So “I Look To You,” out Tuesday, arrives as much more than simply a new Whitney Houston album. It is, in fact, much like the album Michael Jackson might’ve released had he lived –a make-or-break release, a final opportunity to reassert former glories.

Some of “I Look To You” is up to the task. Some of it isn’t. The whole shebang is pretty fascinating, though, mostly because it’s now impossible to separate the music offered here from the back story of the Whitney-Bobby Brown affair, and the very high-profile collapse. There’s something very “Entertainment Tonight” about the whole thing.

Can the former Queen of R&B reclaim her crown after dealing with the devil for so long? It’s much more of a human interest story than it is a musical one.

What is immediately surprising, as revealed about halfway into opener “Million Dollar Bill,” is the lack of air-brushing on Houston’s clearly weathered voice. (The photo on the album cover is most likely an entirely different story, however.) The drug battles have obviously diminished Houston’s superhuman instrument, but the abundant studio trickery available to a project with a budget like this one was not employed in hopes of covering up the wrinkles. Immediately, this lends an honesty to the affair.

For a good while, this is enough to carry “I Look To You” forward. That it ultimately collapses beneath the weight of its own attempts to recapture the grandiose balladry that made Houston huge in the late ’80s and early ’90s is not surprising. Perhaps it’s enough that Houston managed to get it together, relearn her craft and get back into the recording studio. Expecting her to reinvent the wheel that gave her a ride to the “topermost of the popermost” might be too much to expect.

So the cheese abounds, folks, and it’s the thick and gooey variety. Way bogus drum machine sounds, flaccid percussion loops, syrupy strings and synths that burp and giggle like a Pac Man game gone wild are the order of the day. It doesn’t really need saying that Houston’s virtuosic, gospel-based singing would’ve greatly benefited from an even slightly more organic approach. But I’ll say it anyway.

Interestingly, this tendency doesn’t really make the album sound too particularly dated, since modern production techniques favor the ’80s-throwback approach, from Mariah Carey to Fergie and back again. So Houston is clearly making a grab for the contemporary Diva tiara, the one hard living caused her to lose her grip on a decade back.

“Million Dollar Bill” was written by Alicia Keys, and the younger singer’s influence is all over that song, as well as many of the best of the rest of them. Disco-fied soul with a touch of gospel, “Bill” is buoyant secular sex music, but Houston doesn’t get all Lady GaGa gross on us— “class” is the watchword here. Houston is asserting herself as a sensual woman who can be coy about sexuality, avoiding the explicit in favor of the much more alluring implicit approach. Nearly everyone in the modern Diva class could and should take a page from Houston’s manual in this regard.

Like Joni Mitchell — and this is the only way she’s like Joni Mitchell, let’s be clear — the dissolution of Houston’s once bell-like, octave-leaping voice into a huskier, occasionally strained tone has granted her entry into an entirely different VIP party, one where life experience trumps good looks. Hear it in her cover of Leon Russell’s “A Song For You,” which begins as a plaintive ballad arranged with bountiful space for Houston’s vocal. That she’s not the vocal gymnast she once was turns out to be a good thing; now, she favors emotion over technique, and is thus much more sexy than shrill. Houston sounds like a woman, not a boy-toy.

Sometimes, the completely naked attempts to make the singer “hip” are cringe-inducing.

But on balance, “I Look To You” is an honest album, one that forgoes the urge to “hiphopify” an older artist in order to market her to a younger crowd. It’s a strong, fun, often buoyant and deliciously pretense-free R&B album. And it’s more than nice to hear that beautiful voice working its magic again.

★★★ (Out of four)

CD Review

Whitney Houston I Look To You [Arista]

jmiers@buffnews.com

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