Monica – whose cat fight with fellow high school R&B diva Brandy, "The Boy Is Mine," hit Number One – shuns the frightful slow-jam genre so popular among her schoolmates. Instead the seventeen-year-old music-biz veteran has chosen a more classic path, with help from the cool hand of producer (and fellow Atlantan) Dallas Austin. The songs on her titled-for-maximum-name-recognition The Boy Is Mine hearken back past hip-hop songbirds like Mary J. Blige and adult-contemporary sirens like Toni Braxton to someplace closer to soul's source. Starting with the baroque strings of "Street Symphony" and continuing with the sweet "Angel of Mine" and the discoish " 'Cross the Room," Monica uses her honey-dipped, church-worthy voice to lift her radiofriendly tunes – and, hopefully, the rest of contemporary R&B – to a higher plane. (RS 794)

NATASHA STOVALL