Though she is clearly being groomed for divadom, Yours Truly never finds Grande outshining her tracks. Yours Truly is all about skimming the surface of contemporary R&B for maximum ear-candy potential. No one is going to mistake Grande’s indefatigably peppy spin on modern R&B as something that extends or explores the vast soul tradition. Once you understand that Pizza Hut is not pizza, that it’s not even a replacement or alternative, just a what-if scenario so alternate that it becomes its own scenario entirely, you can appreciate its worth. It is a buttery, pizza- ish concoction, in which everything wonderful about pizza is brought gleefully, artery-cloggingly over the top. The thing about Pizza Hut is that it isn’t pizza.
An effective vocalist can create urgent and crucial emotions…Īnd then there is Yours Truly, the debut album from 20-year-old Nickelodeon star/Broadway vet Ariana Grande. My favorite R&B album of the year, AlunaGeorge’s Body Music, is like molecular gastronomy. The Weeknd’s Kiss Land (also out next week) is Doggy Chow. Continuing the culinary theme, Janelle Monáe’s sophomore album The Electric Lady (out next week) is like an eclectic tasting menu where all the dishes are arranged around soul. Jaheim’s sixth album, Appreciation Day, falls somewhere in between – he uses his Vandross-like pipes to sing things that Luther never would (the title track’s unabridged name is actually “Pussy Appreciation Day”). Tamar Braxton’s Love and War, meanwhile, would be more like a visit to Olive Garden – its charm is in its tacky populism. If this week’s deluge of new R&B releases were dining experiences, John Legend’s fourth album, Love in the Future, would be a sort of traditional Italian, white-table-cloth, ancient-waiter affair.
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