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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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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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What's missing on Righteous Love is all out excitement: the sexy holy soul that made ''Relish'' a goosebump raiser.
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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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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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Osborne impresses with the warmth and human embrace of her voice.
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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.comThough 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.
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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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SpinDespite 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]
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A fairly routine batch of middling-to-turgid funk numbers about lurrve performed with rather more duty than excitement.
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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.