Release: Loved Me Back To Life
Celine Dion is back with her first English-language studio album in six years, ‘Loved Me Back To Life’. The title track, penned by the ever increasingly popular Sia, serves as the opener. Quite astonishingly, it features undercurrents of dubstep while Dion sounds almost trance-like.
It is followed by the slightly generic sounding ‘Somebody Loves Somebody’ but things are quickly redeemed with the simply show stopping song that is ‘Incredible’ featuring Ne-Yo. Dion‘s vocals soar to the heavens in what is reminiscent of Ne-Yo’s collaboration with Mariah Carey, ‘Angels Cry’.
Unfortunately, the generic pop structure creeps back in for ‘Breakaway’ and ‘Save Your Soul’, but once again Dion recaptures her niche of emotive and heart wrenching balladry on the understated ‘Didn’t Know Love’. But just as things start to look up again, ‘Thank You’ and a cover of Stevie Wonder‘s ‘Overjoyed’ step in and serve as underwhelming fillers, the latter of which has been performed at her residency show in Las Vegas for nearly three years.
Expectations are restored with the pleasantly dramatic gospel-pop ‘Thankful’, although the climax feels a little half baked. Dion’s cover of Janis Ian‘s ‘At Seventeen’ is a carbon copy of the original, and is another song taken from her Vegas residency set list.
‘Always Be Your Girl’ sounds like any Celine Dion classic which fans are bound to adore, while the album draws to a close with the inspirational ‘Unfinished Songs’, written by the incomparable Diane Warren. Dion croons the lyrics: “All that matters is the lessons we learn/ ‘Cause we wrote unfinished songs, waiting for the best part to come along”.
There are a couple of truly outstanding pieces of work in the form of ‘Incredible’, ‘Didn’t Know Love’ and ‘Unfinished Songs’. However, the majority of tracks reproduce the same instrumentals and production which, rather disappointingly, makes them sound the same and rather uninteresting. The Stevie Wonder and Janis Ian Vegas performed covers are unneeded and add nothing to the album, as all Celine Dion fans would have heard them before. It’s a shame that there aren’t any signature vocal performances like the iconic ‘My Heart Will Go On’ or ‘All By Myself’, as they are what separated her from the rest of the uninspiring pop gene pool.
4/10
Reviewer: Aaron Willis
