Stronger With Each Tear

Although Stronger with Each Tear may not be one of her greatest works, it ensures that Blige remains as relevant as any of her more recent contemporaries.

Throughout Stronger With Each Tear, Blige solidly reinforces why she endures as a fan favorite.

The queen of hip-hop soul splits her loyalty between three masters with the agility of a gymnast, but she manages to hold a mood with seamless transitions between each.

Stronger With Each Tear, her ninth studio release, continues a string of releases that play like self-empowerment pep talks garnished by pop assembly-line producers.

A hip-hop soul hymnbook full of inspirationals. There's so much feel-goodness, you might long for the drama of yore.

Stronger with Each Tear might not have the raw emotionalism of some of her earlier work but it's clearly a polished performance from a woman who's 100% comfortable in her own skin, healed wounds and all.

Stronger With Each Tear, as with most R&B albums, attempts to cover all bases and as such feels a little all over the place. Thankfully, there's enough here to cover the cracks that appear when she's taken out of her comfort zone, which, as much as it shows diversity, seems an odd place to want to leave when the results are often so spectacular.

Blige's experiment works in the context of her album.

Blige's frequent problems with pitch control [on "I Can See in Color"] mar what should have been the album's finest moment. Instead, the song is just indicative of the larger problem with Stronger: None of the elements that actually work ever manage to do so at the same time.

The result is minor Mary--strong by many standards, a bit tepid by hers.