Alicia Key’s The Element of Freedom – Reviews round-up

– The Guardian —
According to Alicia Keys, who was battling depression following the loss of a family member, her fourth album was a struggle to conceive. But, as befits the thrust of her songwriting, she overcame adversity to make a confident, well-crafted modern soul record that engages and rewards without doing anything groundbreaking. Almost every track deals with the ups and downs of love and proceeds at a stately pace. The restraint works powerfully on “Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart”, but the punchier moments towards the end – the Beyoncé duet and a return to Jay-Z’s exuberant “Empire State of Mind” – come as something of a relief.
Killian Fox – The Guardian

Read more reviews from the BBC, The Independent, Spin Magazine and more after the jump!

– BBC Music —

Whenever an artist describes their latest work as “a journey”, invariably the only journey a listener wishes to embark on is the one to the off switch. But Keys’ canny ability to fox and beguile make The Element of Freedom an unexpected pleasure.

Love Is Blind opens the album and is fairly characteristic; it’s like a more melodic version of Kanye West’s Say You Will.  This Bed (with Keys on Moog bass) is the greatest lost Philadelphia International Records’ love song you’ll hear in a long while; Beyoncé appears and duets on the bright and clattering Put It in a Love Song. The album closes with Keys’ own version of Empire State of Mind, building on her vocal refrain and bridge from her collaboration with Jay-Z. If ever a song was awaiting a Broadway show to be written around it, this is it. With the rap removed, its straight, literal descriptions of New York and elegant grand piano mean this is the only time the album strays fully into cliché.

The lasting impression of The Element of Freedom will be the disconnect between the prettiness of the songs and the enormity of the beats. Alicia Keys has just made the US diva album for those who can’t abide US divas.

Full review: Daryl Easlea, BBC Music

– The Independent: 3/5 stars —

The Element of Freedom, her fourth studio effort, starts promisingly. Opener “Love Is Blind” makes inventive use of left-to-right stereo panning and sudden drops into a capella, and hopes are high that Keys and coproducer Kerry “Krucial” Brothers are dropping a game-changing opus, a female answer to Kanye’s 808s and Heartbreaks. It doesn’t take long, however, before the first warning signs rear their ugly heads: track two, “Doesn’t Mean Anything”, lazily resorts to the trite and trusted.

Tracks drift by disappointingly, anodyne and indistinguishable. (I genuinely had to keep checking the LCD display to see if we were still on the same track.)

At times, it’s like being force-fed bowl after bowl of semolina. We’re joltedout of the sugar-coma by a shouted greeting “Hey, yo B!/What up, A?”, the cheesily chummy intro to the Beyoncé duet –andtherefore, by law, future single – “Put It in a Love Song”. It’ll be everywhere, although the dreamy, sun-dazed production of the following track “This Bed” is far more deserving of the attention. When the penultimate track “How It Feels to Fly” begins, you can place a bet as to exactly when the choir will come in and how it will be deployed, and you’re probably right.

Keys is that most frustrating of things: a stunning talent who’s too happy to give the world more of which it already has a surfeit. Maybe next time she’ll push herself further.

Full review: Simon Price, The Independent

– Spin: 2.5/6 stars –

Alicia Keys’ 2007 smash “No One” launched this once-precocious R&B singer to U2-level save-the-world-with-song status. So you can’t really blame her for carbon-copying its charms in “Doesn’t Mean Anything,” the openly anthemic lead single from Keys’ fourth studio set. (Also unsurprising: the tune’s plodding similarity to “With or Without You.”) Yet on an album called The Element of Freedom you may wonder where all the freedom went: In most of these dozen tracks (not including a ponderous intro regarding the necessity of risk and a slow-jam sequel to Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind”) Keys seems uninterested in breaking new ground, snooze-controlling her way through a series of familiar piano-soul platitudes. A couple of nifty exceptions brighten things up, such as “Love Is Blind,” an 808s & Heartbreak-style future-funk jam, and “Put It in a Love Song,” which features the always dependable Beyoncé. But The Element of Safety might’ve been a more accurate title.
Mikael Wood, Spin