The good news about Mariah Carey's seventh release is "Close My Eyes."
With its solid melody, strong vocal performance, nicely restrained
arrangement and personal though guarded lyrics, it's one of the best things
Carey has recorded.
The bad news is the album has 11 other songs.
Not that "Butterfly," in stores Tuesday, is awful. It's just another
Mariah Carey album, a standard-issue diva showcase that takes her voice -- a
wondrous, multi-octave vocal instrument -- and allows it to languish in
cookie-cutter songs that champion synthesizers over soul.
Like the rest of Carey's albums, "Butterfly" is oblique, but even more
maddeningly so now that Carey is her own principal lyricist. These songs --
most of them riddled with cliches about loving you, missing you, needing you
and how good it feels inside -- could be about anybody. In "Close My
Eyes," Carey makes allusions to learning "many things little ones
shouldn't know" and growing up "a little too soon," but she never
elaborates. Only in the album-closing "Outside" does she seem to cut
deeper, singing "Standing alone/ Eager to just believe it's good enough to
be/ What you really are/ But in your heart/ Uncertainty forever lies."
Isn't this a woman who's in the midst of a divorce (from her label's
chief, Tommy Mottola)? Isn't this Carey's opportunity to bare a little more
of her soul than we've seen before? At 27, isn't she tiring of choruses
about looking for "another taste of honey"? Apparently not.
"Butterfly" doesn't explore much new musical territory, either. On the
bulk of the songs, Carey and her main producer, Walter Afanasieff, build
lush, slow-tempo backings for cloyingly torchy material such as "Fourth of
July," "Whenever You Call" and "Butterfly," which is reprised in a
disco mix later in the album. Hip-hop mogul Sean "Puffy" Combs is
disappointing on his two songs, the meandering lead-off track "Honey" and
the messy, wordy swirl of "Breakdown." "Babydoll" is a disturbingly
passive study in dependence and submission, and Carey -- who covered
Journey's "Open Arms" on her previous album -- proves again she's a poor
judge of other people's songs, slogging with Dru Hill through a nearly seven-
minute version of Prince's "The Beautiful Ones."
"Butterfly" is easy enough on the ears that it will probably continue
Carey's multiplatinum sales streak and add some more Grammy nominations to
her resume, and maybe she'll even win some this time. But Carey should be
able to do much better than this.
Gary Graff, The San Francisco Chronicle, Sept 14/98
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