WHITNEY HOUSTON. Just Whitney ***


Never mind her foibles, Whitney Houston has still got it - most of the time, says David Sinclair


Her loopy reputation precedes her these days. But if you ask me, the more Whitney Houston has gone off the rails the better her music has become. Her last British tour, in 1999, was marked by reports of erratic behaviour. But whenever she did (eventually) walk on stage to perform hits such as It's Not Right but It's OK and My Love is Your Love the air around her seemed to crackle with kinetic energy. No longer the queen of the power ballad -a baton which she handed on to Celine Dion sometime in the 1990s -Houston had somehow transformed herself into a righteous R&B dominatrix with an unlikely hint of ghetto fabulous.

Now, as her 40th birthday approaches, she seems intent on having her cake and eating it with her new album, Just Whitney (Arista/BMG). On the one hand there is a run of old-school torch songs and big, break-up ballads every bit as dull and schmaltzy as her early stuff. A Babyface-produced version of the standard You Light up my Life is given the full showboating treatment, while On my Own even has a chorus which begins with the words "And I ..." sung in such a way that you can't help but worry that the line is going to finish "... will always love you."

But the street-smart side of Houston has not disappeared altogether, and at the other end of the spectrum the current single, Whatchulookinat, is a much harder, Bobby Brown production (and P. Diddy remix) in which a frankly rather paranoid lyric is delivered with a feisty, Beyonce-ish wobble in the voice. New Whitney and Old Whitney even get to team up for the autobiographical Unashamed, a song with a fairly bland instrumental arrangement but laced together with a vocal thread of pure steel: "Listen here and listen good. I'm unashamed of the life that I lead, unashamed of the strength of my need."

Good for you, girl. Just don't get too comfortable with it.