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The
Heat
Toni Braxton |
After a nearly four-year absence from recording, Toni Braxton
returns with The Heat, her third album. Full of drama--sometimes
melodrama--it unsurprisingly puts Braxton's rich voice and command
of nuance front and center of one state-of-the-art track after
another. Unfortunately, The Heat plays up her taste for ballads
to such a point that the disc bores itself into a quiet-storm
rut. The big exception is the Rodney Jerkins-produced first
single, "He Wasn't Man Enough." The song's smoldering rebuff
and Jerkins's measured funk make a perfect match for Braxton's
matter-of-fact hauteur. She also delivers a tough take on reality
with "Just Be a Man About It," which pits her against Dr. Dre
in a breakup scenario that carries much more force than weightless
trifles such as the filler sex-me-up "The Art of Love" and Diane
Warren's "Spanish Guitar."
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