Usher

Here I Stand (Sony/BMG)

I have a confession: I like Usher. That admission won’t do much for my credibility as a serious rock critic, but I can’t deny it. Usher Raymond IV has got a good voice, one practically made for singing pop R & B ballads, and—although he possesses the chops to do so—he never ruins his songs by putting melismatic runs over everything. Well, hardly ever. So, even if it’s a guilty pleasure, I don’t feel too ashamed about having killer singles like “U Got It Bad” and “My Way” on my iPod.

That’s the thing, though: Usher’s charm has so far been best taken in small doses. His albums have tended to get bogged down in interminable slow jams and slick but insubstantial urban dance grooves. Although it’s not quite a departure from the standard format, Here I Stand is at least thematically consistent. This is the newly married daddy’s bad-boy-gone-good record, full of songs about embracing fatherhood (“Prayer for You [Interlude]”) and leaving his player ways behind (“Before I Met You” and “Appetite”). If the disc suffers for being too long and overly formulaic, it does have its bright spots. On “Moving Mountains”, the singer does his broken-man best over a synth line that sounds a little too much like the one Timbaland utilized on Justin Timberlake’s “My Love”. It’s a fine vocal performance, though, and Usher matches it on the decidedly more upbeat “Something Special”, a Jermaine Dupri production that takes a stab at old-school soul à la Otis Redding.

All of which shows that Usher’s at his best when he’s singing something other than generic Usher songs. Oh well, no one says you have to listen to the whole thing. There’s a reason the iTunes store sells individual tracks, and this is it.