Teena Marie, "Beautiful" (January 15, 2013)

[Nick]

UrbanBridgez.com has exclusively learned that Teena Marie‘s final album entitled “Beautiful” will be released on January 15, 2013 via Universal.

The album was finished prior to Teena‘s passing on December 26, 2010 of natural causes. Teena‘s daughter Alia Rose is one of the executive producers of the album.


urbanbridgez.com/ubgblog/2012/09/19/ub-exclusive-final-teena-marie-album-beautiful-to-be-released-in-january/

[Agent Yoncé]

This should be interesting.

[tae04]

Yes! Ill be waiting.

[anitabakerfan]

Sept 22, 2012 19:18:16 GMT -5 tae04 said:

Yes! Ill be waiting.

Me too!

[Jazzy]

I adore Teena and miss her so much. I'm looking forward to this. I just hope she actually finished the album and they're not just taking a dozen or so tracks she recorded since the release of her last album and her death and trying to pass them off as a finished album.

[SHOOTER]

Sept 24, 2012 15:09:40 GMT -5 Jazzy said:

I adore Teena and miss her so much. I'm looking forward to this. I just hope she actually finished the album and they're not just taking a dozen or so tracks she recorded since the release of her last album and her death and trying to pass them off as a finished album.

I remember her tweeting that she had finished her last album. Kinda creepy now that I think back on it.

[Soulsista]

Can't wait.

[Nick]

"Luv Letter" is the 1st single, out on 10/22.

Listen to preview here:

urbanbridgez.com/ubgblog/2012/10/13/new-single-from-the-late-teena-marie-entitled-luv-letter-available-october-22nd/

[tae04]

Glad we are getting new music soon!

[tae04]

Luv Letter - Full Leak
urbanbridgez.com/ubgblog/2012/10/17/new-music-teena-marie-luv-letter/

[SHOOTER]

1. Luv Letter
2. Sweet Tooth
3. Rare Breed feat. Alia Rose & Ty James
4. Love Starved
5. Definition of Down
6. Maria Bonita
7. Beautiful (For Alia)
8. The Long Play
9. Carte Blanche
10. Give Me Your Love feat. Alia Rose
11. Wild Horses
12. The Perfect Feeling

[Caviar]

Was there any some concrete reason how she passed?

[Jazzy]

I hate when album cover photos are run through a basic color filter. It looks cheap.

Dec 19, 2012 14:04:57 GMT -5 Caviar said:

Was there any some concrete reason how she passed?

No. It was just ruled natural causes. The most likely cause was a tonic-clonic seizure. She'd been having seizures for years and stopped taking her seizure medication because it was causing depression.

[Nick]

Samples:

www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Teena-Marie/dp/B009PCHB5Q/ref=sr_1_36?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1356703569&sr=1-36

[Dreams]

^ Sounds good. I love the production.

[Jazzy]

The album is giving me a mix of Passion Play and Sapphire. The tracks sound pretty unremarkable. Just pleasant.

[tae04]

I'm loving the snippets! I get a Passion Play vibe too. I'm loving Maria Bonita, which is an updated version of a song called Spanish Harlem that was never released on her Black Rain cd. The Perfect Feeling was on that cd too. Wild Horses is from Passion Play. Can't wait to buy this on Itunes Jan 15th lol.

[Jazzy]

Slant gave the album 2/5. I agree with their review for the most part, but I never really had a problem with her voice on her last few albums.

Pop audiences may know the late Teena Marie only from straightforward '80s hits like "Lover Girl" and "Ooo La La La," but the real litmus test for how much you'll take to her hardcore R&B beginnings is that great Mt. Olympus moment on Rick James's "Fire and Desire," when out of nowhere she unleashes the titanic wail that would become her trademark and stops the song dead in its tracks. In love with its own brute force, Marie's singing is more polarizing than her incontestable position as the Ivory Queen of Soul would suggest. Demonstrating little interest in the nuanced delivery and textural variation of the legendary vocalists she constantly name-checked in her songs, she knew she was at her best when she was at her loudest, which means that even a top-tier Teena Marie album can become exhausting when experienced straight through.

It's hard to listen to born belters as they age and struggle to adapt to their atrophied, increasingly uncooperative instruments. That's why, regardless of the theoretical appeal of watching this justly revered artist putting her best foot forward in the R&B game after her 2004 comeback with La Doña, her late-career work is more often than not a chore to sit through. By most standards still in fine voice, Marie nevertheless insisted on writing her songs in the usual sky-high key, which eventually forced her to take constant recourse to an alternately thin and abrasive falsetto and an ever more overbearing vibrato. On the posthumous Beautiful, assembled by her daughter Alia Rose, the problem persists, further magnified by an absence of the solid songwriting that appeared in patches throughout her albums of the past decade (most abundantly 2006's Sapphire).

After leaving Motown four albums into her career, Marie gave up her allegiance to the kaleidoscopic disco-funk and lush quiet storm she mastered under Rick James's tutelage. So, all these years later, it's pointless to approach Beautiful anticipating the next "Behind the Groove" or "Young Love." This doesn't keep her from winking at past triumphs (as on the brief interpolation of "Portuguese Love" on "Maria Bonita") and alluding to soul giants (she quotes Stevie Wonder and Chaka Khan on four separate songs, and delivers a nice but unnecessary cover of Curtis Mayfield's "Give Me Your Love"). For the most part, though, the album is padded with second-rate, synth-heavy production, interminably repetitive grooves, lyrics that veer from sexed-up to schmaltzy, and barely there melodies derivative of previous work. The result is an album that feels outdated, even when it's hard to pin down precisely what era of music she's nostalgic for.

In a marketplace that has all but closed its doors to old-school R&B, it seems a shame to fault an artist whose last dash of productivity so clearly emanated from a commitment to the genre as her native language. Much has been made of Marie's role as one of the few white singers to be fully embraced by the urban audience while remaining mostly ignored on the pop charts, and one can only speculate that her outsider status gave her the distance to mix and match so many strains of black music—not just Rick James funk, but the classic soul she adored, the elements of jazz she picked up from her idol Sarah Vaughan, and the rap she was spitting as early as 1981's "Square Biz." It's remarkable that, when she joined Cash Money Records in the mid-aughts, the matter-of-factness with which she assimilated retro sounds with an up-to-date hip-hop persona rendered her middle-aged white-woman identity barely worth a mention.

All the while, Marie has never sounded like anything other than herself: The keening phrasing, the squawky tone, and the nonstop exuberance all point to her unflagging individuality. But anyone introduced to her through Beautiful would be hard-pressed to figure out what all the fuss is about, since it reflects neither the vocal virtuosity nor the wide-ranging musical adventurousness of her best work. The album has some memorable moments on unabashedly silly midtempos like "Sweet Tooth" and the lightly Auto-Tuned boast track "Rare Breed." But at its worst, particularly on slow jams "Definition of Down," "Carte Blanche," and "The Perfect Feeling," the songs are plodding, shapeless, and vaguely desperate. When it comes to posthumous Lady T, better to invest in 2011's First Class Love: Rare Tee, a revelatory compilation full of unreleased material that takes the singer from finger-snapping Motown to stunningly intimate acoustic settings. The difference is striking: Even on the scrappiest material, it's clear that the clarion call of her voice in all its youthful glory remains the core of her legacy.

www.slantmagazine.com/music/review/teena-marie-beautiful/2963

[Nick]

I'll check it out on Spotify this week. Hope they add it on Tuesday.

[Dreams]

That review sounded kind of harsh to me. For a posthumus release it's quite good overall, IMO, in spite of the fact that there's no big highlight on the album basically.

Jan 13, 2013 17:28:23 GMT -5 Jazzy said:

I never really had a problem with her voice on her last few albums.

Same. Although the old-school, ostentatious vocals were part of her appeal, I liked Teena's vocals on her last few albums too.

[Luckie Starchild]

Dec 28, 2012 13:32:39 GMT -5 Jazzy said:

The album is giving me a mix of Passion Play and Sapphire. The tracks sound pretty unremarkable. Just pleasant.

I think Passion Play has a number of strong tracks.

[tae04]

Picked up my copy. I love the album! I don't know what that review is talking about. Highlights are Beautiful, Maria Bonita, Definition of Down, Carte Blanche, Perfect Feeling, When Smokey Sings, Give Me Your Love, and The Long Play. It's a very sexy/smooth production.

[mytia]

I love this CD! Teena was 54 when she died, and I wasn't buying this music for it to sound contemporary, so it doesn't sound "outdated" to me. For me Teena's vocals have always been right on the edge. I've heard them described as she sounds like she's crying or just got through crying, or just getting ready to cry. At any rate, I love "Maria Bonita," "Rare Breed," "Sweet Tooth," "Luv Letter." I could do without "Give Me Your Love," probably because I don't think her daughter can sing.

[Jazzy]

The title track is Top 50 at Urban AC.

[tae04]

^Oh, Beautiful is the 2nd single? Wonderful!

[Jazzy]

I don't know if it's actually the second single. I haven't seen any kind of announcement or adds date. It could have just been played on a syndicated show for all I know. That's enough to get a song into the Top 50 at Urban AC.

[Luckie Starchild]

Itunes includes a cover of "Ooh Baby Baby."

[Nick]

I'm liking what I'm hearing so far. Not a fan of her daughter's voice, but I digress.

[fire]

anything like Honey Call (from la dona) on it? that is still my jam

[mytia]

Anyone know how much label support this album is getting? I've heard a couple of interviews Teena's daughter did, and they sounded like someone just woke her up and put her on the phone. Along with that has been some tweets. I never saw anything listed on All Access, no banner ads, no add dates. Nothing.

About 2,000 in sales is what I think it will do this first week, and then disappear. Her family and label waited too long to put "Beautuful" out, two years. It should have been released a year after Teena's death.