Marc Anthony: Marc Anthony : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

With his first english-language recording, New York salsa star Marc Anthony enters the World's Perfect Boyfriend Contest, Sensitive Category, and he may just breeze away with the gold. Anthony brings his supple tenor and exquisite phrasing to anguished love ballads while retaining much of the salsa orchestration that powered his previous albums. If the singer's constant state of apocalyptic romantic swoon is a little suspicious, the earnest lyrics and lilting arrangements render any doubts churlish. He's breathy on restrained ballads like "Am I the Only One" and "My Baby You," but his elastic, shimmering vocals bring alive the strongly Latin "You Sang to Me" and "When I Dream at Night." The single "I Need to Know" benefits from saucy cabaret strings and pumping repetition, although Anthony swings it harder on the Spanish version - his vocals fill every corner of the rococo salsafied space. And the shimmying loyalty oath "She's Been Good to Me" soars in both languages. (RS 825)
ARION BERGER