'No one, no one...' should listen to this album

"No One" was a good sign: The first single from Alicia Keys' new album "As I Am" has a great hook and a strong beat. Sure, she went slightly overboard on the vocals, screaming her head off from the first chorus, but it finally sounded like she was letting loose. Her first two albums, "Songs in A Minor" (2001) and "The Diary of Alicia Keys" (2003), were impressive but flawed records: Both were overlong, overproduced and overloaded with bland ballads. When Keys did let rip, though, she sounded great; for example on the irresistible "Fallin'," on the even better "If I Ain't Got You" and especially on the underrated "Karma," with its soaring string samples and nifty structure. Those albums showed that Keys had a lot of promise, but neither one delivered what I'm sure she's capable of. But if "No One" was a sign of things to come, then maybe, I thought, she would finally give us an album full of great songs rather than one dotted with them. Sadly, "As I Am" fails to fulfill that promise. In fact, it suggests that Keys is regressing, as she delivers her most musically and lyrically immature work to date.

The album starts pretty well. A stately little piano intro segues into one of the album's strongest songs, the rousing "Go Ahead," which, with its little synthesizer squeaks and jubilant production, sounds like it could have fallen off a '70s Stevie Wonder record. The Stevie Wonder references continue in the next song, "Superwoman," undoubtedly a homage to his 1972 song of the same name. Though it's no masterpiece, it has a warm chorus and a light, funky groove to it and slots into the "pleasant ballad" department rather than the "schlocky crap" one.

There are a couple other good songs, too, including the silly-but-endearing "Teenage Love Affair" and the catchy "I Need You." My favorite song, however, is the sweeping, Supremes-esque "Wreckless Love," which anchors a great melody to a strong drumbeat and punchy horn section. It's on this song that Keys best emulates the '60s and '70s soul stars she so clearly worships.

The rest of the album, however, is unmemorable at its best and downright dire at its worst; it shows how little progress Keys has made in the four years since her last release. There are two songs that I'd especially like to single out, just to warn you. The first, falling squarely into the schlocky category, is "Like You'll Never See Me Again," which rips off, of all people, Janet Jackson. Keys lifts almost wholesale the keyboard riff from Jackson's recent "Call On Me" single and even imitates her trademark breathy vocals. Now there's an inspiration that the oh-so-serious Keys fails to mention in interviews! But it's during the next track, "Lesson Learned," that I almost ripped off my headphones in horror. Tragically, Keys collaborates with the man who represents, to me at least, the nadir of popular music at the moment: the abominable John Mayer. The song actually starts off okay, but as soon as his sickly sweet background vocals creep in on the chorus, it dies. This guy, with his nasal, insipid voice and "soulful" pretensions, is destined to become the new Phil Collins, I swear it, and he casts a pall of glossy blandness from which the album is unable to escape.

To tell you the truth, the problem is not that the album is bad, exactly, it's just that it's so totally, dispiritingly unadventurous. I expected much more from "As I Am," especially considering that Keys has taken such a long time to make it. No longer is there the sense of unfulfilled talent, of a precocious youngster trying too hard to impress us, because this time around there aren't any fantastic songs to make up for the missteps. The best songs here are satisfying rather than transcendent and show little of the songwriting talent that distinguished Keys' best songs and singled her out as someone to watch.

The lyrics are especially disappointing: With the exception of the simplistic feminist anthem "Superwoman," Keys spends an hour rattling on about love and relationships in the most cliched and dreary way imaginable. You can tell she's trying so hard to be "deep" and "soul-searching" but with lyrics ripped off from Cascada's "Every Time We Touch" and songs like the brain-dead "The Thing About Love," it just comes off as trite and forced. It's worrying that her first album, which she made at age 19, showed more emotional insight in one song than she manages to show in the whole of "As I Am" six years later. For the first time in her career, Keys sounds like a straggler rather than a leader in the mainstream music world, determinedly digging out her old Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin records instead of creating something new and exciting.