As designer champagne 'n' anguish R&B goes, Secrets goes down nice and easy. A little too easy. The tiptoe tempos and low-wattage arrangements – particularly the grass-mat effect of the guitar playing on several of the tracks produced by Babyface – smooth out all the bumps in these in-and-out-of-heart-break songs. Even "I Don't Want To," written and produced by rumpled-sheet soulman R. Kelly, is a quiet groan of loss and abstinence. The unruffled tenor of the music, however, puts the focus squarely on Braxton, and she's up to it. As a singer, she doesn't reel between the fire-and-woe extremes of Whitney Houston, and her voice lacks the dramatic keen of prime Anita Baker. But Braxton knows how to find the romantic core in a piece of mainstream toffee like "There's No Me Without You," and her bristling tone in the adultery song "Talking in His Sleep" shows that as a lover and a singer, she's no pushover.

Neither is Me'Shell Ndegéocello, a fact too often hyped at the expense of her ravishingly mournful vocals and the dark-groove intrigue of her old-school R&B moves. Peace Beyond Passion is an unrepentantly confrontational record, much more so than Ndegéocello's prickly but comparatively playful 1993 debut, Plantation Lullabies. Her juxtaposition of Christian symbolism and explicit critiques of homophobia and social emasculation in "Leviticus: Faggot" and "Deuteronomy: Niggerman" hang heavy over the already bleak but determined pulse of the songs. Ndegéocello puts a grim, bisexual spin on "Who Is He and What Is He to You" that will forever change the way you listen to Bill Withers' '70s original. In her singing, though, she carries herself with a pride and joy that, however hard won, is unblemished by bitterness. There is plenty of anger here – but it's the kind that comes from caring too much. (RS 750/751)

DAVID FRICKE