Critic's Choice: New CD's from Mary J. and Snoop Dogg

By JON PARELES

MARY J. BLIGE - “Stronger with Each Tear” (Matriarch/Geffen)

Editor's note: Mary J's new a;bum is available for download at amazon.com. Download for $3.99!

The standout on Mary J. Blige’s ninth studio album, “Stronger with Each Tear,” is its final song, “I Can See in Color,” from the soundtrack of “Precious.” It restates Ms. Blige’s favorite message — that tribulation is the beginning of redemption — in an emphatically unadorned minor-key soul setting. Raphael Saadiq’s production supplies a simple drum thump, slow guitar arpeggios and subtly churchy keyboards, and occasionally there are subdued vocal responses from afar. Nothing distracts from Ms. Blige’s voice — bluesy and determined, proud and tearful, utterly exposed and fully human — as she insists, “It took a long time to get to this place/and now that I’m here no one can ever erase/the joy that I feel.”

The song is the culmination of an album on which Ms. Blige straps herself into the contemporary R&B machine, then grapples her way out. Like her fellow R&B songwriters Ms. Blige regularly shops for tracks among the producers and collaborators du jour. On this album they include Akon, Ryan Leslie, Polow da Don, Tricky and The-Dream, and Ne-Yo, who wrote one song each with StarGate and the Stereotypes.

Her chosen producers are masters of what might be called algorithm-and-blues: crisply digitized grids of beats and hooks. Radio stations love algorithm-and-blues, which segues easily from R&B to hip-hop to commercials on a consistent electronic pulse. The arrangements are often supremely clever, but the songs can also be busy and bloodless, and they’re built for adequate voices, not commanding ones. Often they tend to treat vocals as one more neatly placed sound effect.

That can happen even to a singer as vivid as Ms. Blige. She could be just about anyone on the album’s first single, “The One,” a Ping-Ponging, syncopated Rodney Jerkins production that features 2009’s omnipresent guest rapper-singer, Drake. In it Ms. Blige competes with her man’s past and potential partners, announcing, “I ain’t saying that I’m the best — but I’m the best!” But Auto-Tune robotizes her voice, and the narrow melody hardly needs her vocal range.

Through the album Ms. Blige sings, as usual, about hard-won self-esteem. And like her previous album, “Growing Pains,” this one has another recurring subject: the uncertainty of long-term love, weighing fleeting temptations against the satisfactions of staying together. In “Kitchen” she fends off a rival amid hints of Motown, and in “I Am” piano chords mingle with strings as she reminds her man that no matter how much he wants to “act single” when he’s away, he’s not foolish enough to “ruin what you’ve got at home.” She admits to making her own “mistake” and calls for reconciliation in “Said and Done.” In “Each Tear” she tucks in another apology as she strives to be inspirational, asserting, “The last thing that I want is for you to fall apart.”

Song by song the album reveals more of her tangy, impassioned voice: first in a phrase or two to ornament an electronic hook, and gradually in longer lines and whole melodic verses. By the end — with actual piano, strings and horns in a song about marital tensions, “In the Morning,” and then in the “Precious” song — Ms. Blige has traded virtual sounds for hand-played ones. It’s as if she’s left behind the flashing lights and makeup of a flirtatious night out and has come home to be heartfelt.

SNOOP DOGG - “Malice N Wonderland” (Doggy Style/Priority/Capitol)

Jay-Z turned 40 this month and can still sound youthful. Snoop Dogg is 38, but has seemed older for years. Even on his earliest records he sounded world-weary, held down by some invisible weight. And he favored legato with his syllables, confidently slurring them into each other, his verses just one long outstretched word.

On his 10th studio album, “Malice N Wonderland,” though, that glorious voice is ossified. His delivery and rhymes are stiffer. His subject matter too. Snoop has long had an understanding of how to infiltrate the mainstream while maintaining the frisson of outlaw attitude: no one plays the gangster uncle better than he does. Last week, when he appeared on “The Martha Stewart Show,” the host mused, “Who could be better to make Christmas cookies than Snoop Dogg?” Indeed, who?

Ms. Stewart might not appreciate the lewd “I Wanna Rock,” one of the best songs here — driven by a looped sample of the signature zombie-chase intro of the 1988 rap classic “It Takes Two,” by Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock — or “Secrets,” a terrific slice of G-funk revival, produced by Battlecat and featuring the always vivid Kokane singing the hook.

But too often on this album Snoop is a fuddy-duddy, domesticated and palatable. On at least three songs he awkwardly mentions jerking, the dance-centric hip-hop craze so dominant in Southern California this year. And on several tracks he preaches about his love for his wife, Shante, with whom he renewed vows last year after filing for divorce in 2004. (The ceremony was filmed for Snoop’s reality show, “Snoop Dogg’s Father Hood.”)

“A lot of women want me, but I want you,” he raps on “Different Languages,” which features a clumsy Jazmine Sullivan hook. “You look cute when you smile, so I renewed our vows.”

It all has the air of obligation around it. To his wife, maybe, but also to the idea of a refigured Snoop Dogg: not just older but grown-up. “Upside Down,” with its punchy snares and casual bawdiness, is far looser: “Becky and Vicky/Begging me to give me hickeys/Through my Dickies.” Here he sounds unburdened, excited, young.

JON CARAMANICA source