Flesh Tone KELIS

Flesh Tone

[Interscope]

In this post-Black Eyed Peas world, it’s not enough for R&B singers to make genre records. The key, as Rihanna and Christina Aguilera can attest, is to move the masses with futuristic dance pop. This is fine by Kelis, an artist who has long dabbled in hip-hop and minimalist funk, showing a willingness to color outside the lines. On her fifth album, the Harlem-born singer does the dance-makeover thing on her own terms. Flesh Tone plays like a dispatch from a lonely space station where Kelis has sequestered herself with only her wounded psyche and a techno supercomputer. Immersed in the strobe-light thump of European clubland, the singer ruminates on lost love—likely referencing her divorce from rapper Nas—and finds salvation in her infant son. It’s an honest, emotionally messy record, and it’s only in the final three tracks—“Emancipation,” “Brave” and “Song for the Baby”—that this astronaut finds the strength to come back down to earth. –Kenneth Partridge

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