Anthony Hamilton: Comin' From Where I'm From : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

By the end of Anthony Hamilton's twelve-track, ballad-heavy CD, it's pretty hard to shake the sense that you've just listened to one continuous song with little breaks placed roughly every four minutes or so. That the singer-songwriter is talented is without question. But his grittier, bluesier version of the sensitive, wounded black-male boho terrain explored by Musiq, Maxwell and D'Angelo can get seriously derivative. It's also repetitive: Hamilton moans over love gone wrong on song after song (save on the up-from-the-hood title track). Flashes of wit surface in the country grammar of his lyrics and song titles ("Since I Seen't You"), and his falsetto on "Better Days" adds a welcome dash of color to the monochromatic aesthetic scheme, but he really needs to either come at his broken heart from a different angle or, better still, broaden his subject matter altogether.

ERNEST HARDY
(RS 930, September 4, 2003)