Girl on Fire

No flame then, but her light shows no sign of going out. [Jan 2013, p.112]

Her technical brilliance remains stunning; it's now matched by her maturity and modernity. [Jan 2013, p.74]

Less of an anthemic, balls-to-the-wall affair than Elements of Freedom (still her strongest album overall), this one does have its own liberating, empowering charms.

Girl On Fire pushes her superb writing skills forward without losing what makes Alicia Keys the artist she promised to be 11 years ago.

Despite Keys's proficiency (she co-wrote Where's The Fun In Forever, one of the best songs on Miguel's new album), she's always seemed a little boring. On that front, she delivers.

Like Stevie Wonder--who could throw together cloying ballads, funky grooves and reggae homages--Keys is willing to probe her oeuvre and now her own self for songs that resonate beneath the surface.

"New Day" has a transformative effect within the album, whose middle is as strong as any sequence of songs Keys has recorded.

Alicia Keys is a singer-songwriter in the purest sense, and Girl On Fire is at its best when Keys (and her collaborators) remember that.

Girl on Fire is a smart album, maintaining the high standards set on The Element of Freedom.

This balance of radio-friendly R&B and piano ballads bursting with her irrefutable talent is a road frequently traveled for this singer, but it's oh-so-entertaining to watch her set the road ablaze.

Keys has rarely ever sounded so at ease, so downright sensual, as she does as her latest.

In spite of that fresh blood [of collaborators], Girl on Fire basically delivers the same payload as Keys' other albums; it's a collection of handsomely crafted, gorgeously sung ballads interrupted by several overworked anthems about the value of perseverance.

The result is both her catchiest and subtlest album yet--and one of the best R&B records of 2012.

Despite being hyped as her most "personal" album, Girl on Fire is really just more of the same.

It's a measure of how powerful parenthood really is that it generates so many clichés. The new songs that push that subtext out front quickly grow trite, in words and music.... It's the tracks in which Ms. Keys seems to pay attention to a quieter story rather than building new pedestals for herself--that echo and smudge and smear sounds, that lead toward paradox--that suggest something new for her.

Her fifth and arguably most consistent album to date.

Girl on Fire is less a portrait of Keys's womanhood at a crossroads as it is another extension of a career spent predominantly navigating straight down the middle of the road.

As a reinvention, the album doesn't go far enough, and there are some underwhelming tunes, but the best song here--Girl on Fire--wonderfully blends Keys old and new.

["When It's All Over"] itself is one of the worst here, mercifully outnumbered by the merely adequate and the few standout songs.

Her fifth studio album is dominated by navel-gazing auto-therapy sessions.

Ultimately, though, it still cleaves too close to the polite piano soul with which Keys has filled 10 years.

She wants to deliver good, solid, heartfelt slabs of it. And on those terms, her fifth studio album is her best record in years.

After a pair of bombastic anthems--including the oddly written "Girl on Fire," which has her "living in a world, and it's on fire," then "on top of the world" with "both feet on the ground" and "our head in the clouds"--the album loses its grip.