Houston delivers mixed results

Date: November 29, 1996
By Michael Mehle

From Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO)
Submitted by: Larry A.


Whitney Houston The Preacher's Wife Arista Grade B-

There has been no better bet in the music industry than putting Whitney Houston and a soundtrack together.

At last count, The Bodyguard sold 14 million albums. Waiting to Exhale, in which she sang a handful of songs, is still on the R&B charts with 7 million sales.

It's with understandably anxious ears, then, that the music industry waits for reaction to The Preachers Wife, yet another soundtrack starring Houston released Tuesday. Could pop's reigning diva keep it up?

Houston proves again that she knows good songs and songwriters. Just as she cashed in on Dolly Parton's I Will Always Love You, then Babyface's Exhale (Shoop, Shoop), Houston this time taps Annie Lennox's Step by Step. This isn't the usual platform for Houston's vocal escapades, but rather a great groove song with a spirited dance beat and a slick melody. Houston delivers with restrained elan that makes Step by Step an effective departure.

The first single is I Believe in You and Me, a more typical ballad the singer sends soaring with her earwax-loosening vocals flying high above a pop- orchestral arrangement. It's a ready-made holiday hit that will be heard throughout all malls, but the album also includes a second, more subtle version that's less histrionic, and, thus, a lot better.

Yet this won't be an album that keeps cranking out the hits, mainly because more than half of The Preacher's Wife is devoted to Houston's birthright genre, gospel. The Georgia Mass Choir gives a big assist on the album's six gospel numbers, the type of rousing, rock-the-pews productions one expects to see in Hollywood.

Selections such as Joy and Hold On, Help Is on the Way are performed with exuberant, over-the-top zeal as only Houston can, while other gospel cuts are merely over-the-top. Throughout, the choir creates a soothing base that's the perfect foil for Houston's exciting vocals.

Finally, Houston tests whether an artist should mix her marriage and music. Husband Bobby Brown and his New Edition cohort Johnny Gill add little more than punk attitude to Somebody Bigger Than You and I, a song that also features Faith Evans and Monica and Ralph Tresvant that goes nowhere and seems oddly out of place on The Preacher's Wife.