Ms Kelly Réédition Sortie Le 12 mai en angleterre

The Kelly Rowland Listening Session

Kelly Rowland previewed her new album, tentatively titled My Story... Kelly Rowland here in NYC yesterday. At first listen I still say, Kelly Rowland ain't worth the bullet... or the time it takes to load the gun.

Now don't get me wrong... I think Kelly is a bangin' black girl. Her voice has a clarity that I haven't heard since early Whitney. It's like water. She's that copper toned Barbie in every hood that every guy wants to get with. It's just too bad she doesn't know her own worth.

The session began with Kelly explaining that after working on a number of songs and previewing them for her crew, people kept saying, oh it sort of tells a story. Hence the title she selected, My Story... Kelly Rowland. I stayed and listened to her preface about 11 of the tracks with pretty much the same wording.... "Well you see.... I was in this relationship and you know when a guy blah blah blah.... and so I said blah blah blah and that's how I came up with the song." Clearly, Kells is referring to the her now broken engagement to Roy Williams.

Her album is composed of all mid tempo to slow jams with quite a few features (Tank, Snoop possibly Shawwna and Remy Ma). Tank contributed to a couple of the tracks including "Ghetto", a sexy, soft midtempo joint that many people swore was a "Soldier" sound alike. Tank shines lyrically and vocally on "The Show", a cleverly written track that compares love making to a stage show. It sounds like it's his song and Kelly is just singing background for him. I say this because he opens the song in full voice and she enters the song in a soft airy chorus and never reaches full voice until midway through the track, almost as if it's Tank featuring Kelly Rowland.

The standout tracks were "WurkHer Man", "Still In Love With My X", "Tell Me" and "Can't Do It Again", if you can call them that. There is a distinct play on the screw music sound that gives a lot of continuity.

If she has killer videos then this album is sure to be a success, because it's a departure from the first album Simply Deep. I applaud her for using lesser known, up and coming producers and writers. Us underdogs gotta stick together, but the more of the music she played the more obvious it became that Kelly Rowland has been set up. Her budget was shoestring. The room was filled with press and NYC tastemakers and Matthew Knowles had to egg everyone on to applaud and make Kelly feel good about her sub standard set.

Overall on a scale of 1-10.... thus far this album is just a 6 or a 7.