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The album reminds you that those budding superstars can’t beat Carey at her own game.
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Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel is a sprawling, 17-track epic with few obvious singles--but it is loaded with creativity.
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It's puzzling to hear one of music's most powerful voices continually corralled into a feathery R&B midrange; imperfections are nowhere to be found on Memoirs, but neither are many true revelations.
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Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel will stand out in Carey's catalog as an experiment that illuminates her place in the pantheon without either boosting it or damaging it.
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Overall, Carey's throwback vibe on Memoirs is refreshing and much welcomed.
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The album was composed by R&B's best songwriters of the late 2000s, Terius Nash (The-Dream) and Christopher Stewart (Tricky); they give each song the intelligent mid-tempo bump-and-grind they've made into a specialty.
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The result is Carey's most sonically and tonally coherent release, a mix of love ballads ('Inseparable') and sassy breakup anthems ('Standing O') that might have been her best album had it been several songs shorter.
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A return to core principles, which has produced a handful of pretty love songs and a solid overall, Memoirs Of An Imperfect Angel certainly isn't the disaster we were promised, but then nor is it a triumph.
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Memoirs is Carey’s least pyrotechnic album, its flow is as important as its tunes, and while Carey is still given to acrobatic vocal displays, her lattice of subtler vocal overdubs softens and strengthens those flights.
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Mariah is in fine voice throughout the album, and there are plenty of inspired moments to be found....Which makes it all the more disappointing that the album's final stretch devolves into a mess of old-school Mariah rehashes that should have been left in the past.
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That nuance is mostly gone on Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, Ms. Carey’s 12th studio album, which manages simplicity and clutter all at once.
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The album itself reveals she’s also got a penchant for exhuming the sickly-sweet memory of Minnie Riperton’s ‘Loving You’ and setting it to 17 different slow jamz drenched in studio gloss.
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Though it's commendable to stick with one set of producers to give a sense of cohesion, Memoirs could have done with some variation.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 195 out of 392
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Mixed: 75 out of 392
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Negative: 122 out of 392
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Nov 4, 2022
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Jun 26, 2015
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TarekM.Oct 1, 2009MC's latest doesn't disappoint but in fact proves to be a very refreshing R&B experience.