Indispensable

Album Review

Like many of her fellow Mexican TV stars, Lucero is willing to try just about anything if it will sell records. However, her singing is imbued with such homespun blandness, there is a weird sort of integrity to it. Or maybe it's because the image of a Telenovella queen permeates everything she does to the extent that she can't divorce herself from it, in spite of her best efforts (divorcing her husband Mijares and appearing in racy sex scenes - well, racy for Univision/Telemundo standards at least). Fortunately, that makes releases such as this once less embarrassing than they might have been. Here, continuing the campaign to break her innocent image, she and her cohort of producers try to remake her as a contemporary club diva. Accordingly each track starts off with an intro of highly processed sounds, which are actually sort of appealing. The mixing is also pretty stellar. However it becomes clear from the outset that these tunes are reconstructed Latin ballads, and their cumbersome harmonic rhythm soon overwhelms any sense of the propulsive forward motion that dance music must have. The flowing Spanish that is required for demonstrating that one can actually sing, has always been at odds with the proto-fascist beat of modern electronic dance music. There are Latin artists who have pulled off a decent compromise, and Lucero probably should have listened to them, but let's not be too hard on her. She does include at the very end, the Novella version of Duena de Tu Amor that will probably be the reason most fans by this disc anyway, and compared with what came before, its industry standard romanticism fits her like a glove. Furthermore, it's a testament to her inimitable "Lucero" essence, that this drastic and awkward upgrade of production style is simply boring, rather than outright laughable. ~ J.Chandler, Rovi