Whitney pulls out another bag of hits

Date: June 14, 1987
By Eric Snider and Annelise Wamsley

From St. Petersburg Times (Florida)
Submitted by: Larry A.


Whitney Houston: Whitney (Arista)

We say: Slick

After a tremendously successful debut album, many artists get the sophomore jinx. There's the oft-used truism that paralyzes some performers: You have your whole life to write your first album and nine months to write the second.

Whitney Houston doesn't have to worry about any of that. Because she's strictly a singer - a song stylist - all the writing and choosing of songs are left in someone else's capable hands, as are the arrangements and overall production. Not to demean Houston's voice or charisma, but basically all she has to do is show up and sing the best she can.

Houston is going to be around for a long time. Her statuesque beauty mixed with (carefully publicized) homespun values fit hand-in-glove with her prototypical pop voice to create a very appealing package. "Whitney" is the latest installment in her success saga.

Whereas Houston's first album was a scattershot group of songs (many of which became hits) divvied up among several producers, the new album is more focused and cohesive. Narada Michael Walden is the primary helmsman here, but tunes are split among producers Kashif, Michael Masser and Jellybean. Importantly, none of them takes a particularly divergent approach.

"Whitney," like its smash-hit predecessor, "Whitney Houston," is essentially a collection of singles. This is not an album to sit down and absorb intently; however, most of these songs, heard one by one over a period of months on the radio, will go down nicely, indeed.

Houston's voice sounds good, real good. This time out, she's firmer, more confident - there are more high points in which her singing reaches celebratory crescendos. Along with crystalline belting, Houston growls and scats and varies her timbre and phrasing.

Six of the album's seven songs are ballads. "Just the Lonely Talking Again" is swept along by a graceful, romantic melody, and Houston pulls out all the vocal stops - there's a jazzy abandon to her phrasing. Flip the coin and you have "Didn't We Almost Have It All," an overblown tune co-written by Michael Masser (who also co-wrote "The Greatest Love of All") that finds Houston stripped of subtlety - with her wire-to-wire belting, you can just see the fetching songstress looking skyward, arms outstretched. Whitney's mother, Cissy Houston, is featured on the album's only duet, the lilting "I Know Him So Well."

Mom adds a brief, welcome moment of grainy soulfulness to the album.

The uptempo material is a similarly mixed bag. "So Emotional," the record's token rock offering, is hollow and contrived, as if the trumped-up power guitars are supposed to give the song some guts. On the other hand, "Love Will Save the Day" is a unique tune on an extremely mainstream album. Its lively Afro-Cuban flavor, driven by a wall of clattering percussion, is truly joyous. "Love is a Contact Sport" playfully updates Motown with its bouncy, irrepressible hook.

The album's most soulful track is an earlier version of the breezy Isley Brothers tune, "For the Love of You." A great song to start with, Houston interprets it with ease and delicacy.

If you haven't heard "I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)" yet, either you don't own a radio or you've been camping in the Andes for the past couple of weeks. It's a solid tune, on a fast track to the top of the charts, but when compared with last year's infectious "How Will I Know" (written by the same team of George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam) it doesn't measure up.

"Whitney" is, first and foremost, a product. It has been carefully designed, manufactured and packaged. As such, it's easy to be cynical about. But as products go, this is a pretty good one.