Paula Cole: Amen : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Lilith Fair has folded its tents, and the teen-pop genie has escaped from her bottle to take over the charts. Threatened with possible extinction, Paula Cole has created a follow-up to her double-platinum breakthrough, This Fire, that -- like many of the Lilith crew's latest efforts -- is at once more pop and more adventurous, less folksy and self-absorbed. The disco strings and wah-wah guitar of Amen's first track and single, "I Believe in Love," announce a shift from white-girl introspection to classic R&B ambition. Although her technically distinguished cry lacks character, Cole is clearly liberated here, and skeptics will follow suit: This is the Paula Cole song for people who don't like Paula Cole.

The rest maintains a hip heathen tone, but with far less success. The title track reprises a laundry list of blessings that could've been cribbed from Alanis Morissette's "Thank U." Cole assumes an unconvincing ghetto-gal persona on "La Tonya," in which she impersonates Sarah McLachlan's hushed croon, then Mariah Carey's birdcalls. Gang Starr's DJ Premier lends a few gratuitous scratches to "Rhythm of Life," which starts out with the singer rapping Meshell Ndegeocello-style about critics and cynics who "don't understand the lyrics" and ends with chameleon Cole biting Shakespeare: "All the world's a stage, yeah, yeah." Yet the problem with rhymes like "Oh, my God, what is this madness?/I will not let it kill my gladness" isn't comprehensibility: It's triteness. (RS 823)

BARRY WALTERS