Real R&B singer if Atlanta Monica has taken a teen duet with Brandy and forged a long, very, successful and intensely boring solo career.
Another chick storyteller, I was ready to dismiss this album in a paragraph and move on with my life except I am a Brandy fan. And a new duet on a pretty good number off New Life, "It All Belongs to Me", could only be down to Brandy (who I love) for so long before… well, before it couldn't be down to Brandy any more. Plus, nostalgia or otherwise, you gotta be thinking "The Boy Is Mine".
That happened with the last song of the album, a "Time To Move On" where Biggie Smalls voice circa Junior Mafia brought me up, and the song itself, a Solomon Burke-y farethewell with a very strong chorus was the anthesis of the anemic by the numbers Monica I have always found underwhelming.
When you are not a big fan of a genre, and black chick R&B is not gangsta rap, the line between success and failure is awful thin. So despite # 1 r&b album after r&b album, there is something very also ran about Monica. She has a wide vocal range but is only comfortable in a guttural divaish soprano and if you're not a fan it is generic in the extreme.
But two songs in, I found New Life revealing itself. The Wales song wasn't bad, on the deluxe version the Rick Ross duet -Ross's bass worked well in counter distinction with Monica's velvety tone, the back up singers help carry Monica along on the lovely ("I wanna fall in love…") "Catch Me. And before I knew it I was 5 songs deep.
In this day and age 5 songs equals a pretty damn good album.
Even the production is pretty good, a Hip Hop informed sound mix using a real band and computers to mic and match at will. It tries (and sometimes succeeds) in mixing Monica's Betty Wright obsession with a contemporary flavor. As contemporary as her reality show.
Grade: B+