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CDNow

Her triumphant, long-awaited Righteous Love is no carbon copy of Relish, but that's because Osborne, who's always demonstrated open ears, has continued to develop as an artist and take on additional influences.

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Sonicnet

Righteous Love turns out to have been worth the five-year wait, as it boasts a higher percentage of good songs than Relish, a more organic instrumental sound, and a singer whose vocal finesse now matches her raw power.

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Entertainment Weekly

What's missing on Righteous Love is all out excitement: the sexy holy soul that made ''Relish'' a goosebump raiser.

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Rolling Stone

Osborne impresses with the warmth and human embrace of her voice.

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MTV.com

Very unique and very, very good....the songs on Righteous Love are brimming with the sorts of influences that you don't hear too much on the radio today: gender-bending atmospherics... Sly Stone/bar-rock amalgams... Dylan's recent haziness...

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Wall of Sound

She's older, wiser, and more steadied in her approach across the 11 songs that make up the album, but had this disc come out in 1997 or 1998, it would've been seen as a somewhat less-impressive follow-up to Relish.

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All Music Guide

Mitchell ropes in the loud blues and soul leanings that made her previous album so much fun, and the singer herself emotes in a much more restrained pop vein.

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Checkout.com

Though the album finds Osborne a blues-belting, soul-sizzling, R&B vocalist... most of the songs just don't work in spite of the fact that all of Osborne's ducks (lyrics, music, arrangements and production) are lined up nicely.... Osborne's musical diversity and experimentation are brave actions in the face of the smothering homogeneity that continues to invade the art form, but even the most excellent elements will fall to certain ruination if miscombined.

Q Magazine

Osborne still sings well, but, apart from the late swamp-dirty sequence of Baby Love, Hurricane and Poison Apples, deadly rock orthodoxy prevails.

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Spin

Despite some bold, funkdafied grunting, it never really gets up off the downstroke... the bar-band bluster only blunts her individualism, making for music that's less Take Back the Night than the Night Belongs to Michelob. [Oct 2000, p.184]

Billboard

To be sure, Osborne proves again she has a wonderfully rich, sensual, and powerful voice that commands respect. But besides a winning cover of Bob Dylan's "To Make You Feel My Love," she chooses to showcase it among mostly flat and/or generic arrangements.

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Mojo

A fairly routine batch of middling-to-turgid funk numbers about lurrve performed with rather more duty than excitement.

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What Our Users Said

The average user rating for this album is 9.6 (out of 10) based on 3 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

brian barrey gave it a 10:
Vocals are superb and well written. Recording is crisp and savory, well to be listened to with fine wine or parties. My first exposure to Joan but I'll definely look up more if this is what she has to offer the world!

[Anonymous] gave it a 10:
I love this album. It deserves much more attention as does Joan herself. What a voice!

Sue B. gave it a 9:
Caught in the crossfire of label takeovers and overwhelmed by the sudden success of RELISH, Joan Osborne took 5 long years to reward her fans with a work of RIGHTEOUS LOVE. LOVE takes an entirely different tack than RELISH, but becomes a part of the listener nonetheless. Instead of blowing us away with brash intensity, these songs insinuate themselves into the ear, the head, the soul. The arrangements are a bit too restrained, making the album easy to dismiss at first listen; but a second hearing begs for a third, and so-on. This CD is perfect for the highway as well as a bumpin' romantic evening at home with your sweetheart.

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