Thank You

Thank You is a powerful showcase for how good Ross is even after a two-decade absence.

The songs feel familiar, as if they’ve even assembled from parts of previous hits. ... All that said, there’s still an inordinate deal of pleasure to be taken in music that wants to sweep you up and revel in sonic bliss, whether you’ve emerged from a still-lingering pandemic or not.

Nobody is trying to do anything too contemporary here, and the slight remove these musicians bring to creating contemporary Ross music means we often get a pastiche of her earlier material. It’s effective, but the danger is that it veers tantalisingly close to sounding like an ironic tribute. And so, the album perhaps fares best in its simplest, and most sincerely constructed moments.

As with her best material, it's an album to lip-synch for your life to. [Oct 2021, p.31]

On Thank You, Diana Ross’ musical star shines strong after six decades of inspiration, offering signs of renaissance even as she teases tender farewells.

Ultimately, it feels as if everybody involved in ‘Thank You’ has reverentially tried to make the platonic ideal of a Diana Ross album, but instead fallen into the late-career artist deadzone of a pleasant record that neither particularly updates nor diminishes her legacy.

Conviction is always evident in her soothing voice, even when it's modulated to a jarring extent or sounds somewhat garbled.

She mostly sounds tired, and her voice seems wrapped in gauze. The record is grandiosely overproduced, so Ross often competes with walls of instrumentation and always loses.

[Let’s Do It] feels like proof that Diana Ross could still make a great album if she wanted to, if she was steered more carefully, or partnered more sympathetically. But she hasn’t been, and this is the result: Thank You, but no thank you.