Carey goes cautious, sounds like R&B
This record is so not about physics. "E" stands for "Emancipation", meaning "The Emancipation of Mimi", the album Mariah Carey made in 2005, which repaired her hit-making reputation. We're to understand that this is in the same vein, or better. Squared.
And it is in the same vein, but much less good. She has tamped down her voice even further, so that she sounds more in line with newer R&B singers. You only hear a fraction of her sound. Perhaps the album is Stage 2 in Carey's quest to find herself, but it also sounds more cautious.
Like "Mimi", the new album opens with a song about looking for a better club than the one she's in. It mentions Patron instead of Bacardi, and it comes with guest vocals from T-Pain, who, despite all the auto-tuning, is more exciting here, in "Migrate", than Carey; he runs off his verses with a lot more flexibility and swing. Her part is a questionably sexy act of concealment, just as "Touch My Body", the album's first single, is a questionably sexy striptease: a goofy-sleazy tryst vignette in which she coos, "If there's a camera up in here then I best not catch this flick on YouTube."
"I Wish You Well" is the last and possibly cleverest track, with just voices and piano; like "Mimi" this album ends with quasi-gospel citing chapter and verse four times, and again using the voice of her spiritual adviser, the Rev. Clarence Keaton. (Charlotte Observer)
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