Toni Braxton may have just got engaged to hip-hop mogul Birdman, but there isn’t any sign of a heel-clicking, lamppost-swinging flush of love here – she seems permanently marooned in a Mariana trench of post-breakup misery. This is of course her dominant mode. She remains best known for Unbreak My Heart, where the dejected singer knows how impossible the task of the title is, but is powerless not to request it. Lyrically, even upbeat hits such as You’re Making Me High are freighted with a quiet pain. Like Billie Holiday, Braxton’s voice reflexively bends towards sadness, and it continues to do so even when there’s a diamond on her finger.
A very strong trio of songs open this record, beginning with Deadwood, which has a fantastic singalong chorus alongside acoustic strumming and chardonnay-doused strings. Perhaps it could have benefitted from a more traditional power ballad arrangement, but it’s very good nonetheless. Braxton’s intonation of “deadwood” – putting the emphasis bitterly on the “dead” – is the kind of impactful, classy detail you can only paint after a lifetime of heartache songs.
The smooth R&B single Long As I Live has an even stronger central melody, but it’s the title track, a piano ballad, that really dominates this opening salvo: a tale of emotional abuse with Braxton at an Unbreak level of trauma, pleading “at least lie to me, lie to me” to a cheating lover who doesn’t bother to mask his scent of sex and cigarettes. By the end you can practically hear the snot and tears as she crumples. Lesser singers would tip it into camp; Braxton makes it shockingly raw.
She doesn’t quite reach those heights again, and there is some slightly rote production: the Viva La Vida ripoff of Coping and the already passé tropical house of Missin’. But there’s still a masterly emotional range: from simmering anger on FOH (“Boy you must be suicidal / Is that bitch right there beside you” scans with a chilling brilliance) to tender regret on My Heart. No real joy or happiness, mind – you do rather feel for Birdman listening to it for the first time.
