Multi Platinum award winning singer and sometime actress Alicia Keys marks yet another return to the number one spot on the Billboard Charts with her fourth studio album The Element of Freedom. Fourteen tracks follow the theme of love, loss, and growth through a variety of styles and sounds including a throwback to 80’s R&B and pop offerings providing a more acoustic sound with an appearance by mega star Beyonce.

The Element of Freedom is not what I had expected when I first listened to it. It was catchy, themed, but most of all safe. My first time through I had an enjoyable listen just sitting back on the couch soaking in the lyrical, admiring Keys ability to respect and use a formulated approach to some of the songs on the album that didn’t exactly fit the mold but stick relatively close to the genre of R&B (think Gavin DeGraw). By the time I listened to the album for the third time I had discovered all there is to discover about the album and started to find the albums flaws.

While the poetic intro to the album lets you know this is somewhat a concept album the theme gets old fast. Lyrically there is hardly anything new said about the pain, ecstasy, and struggles in between when concerning love. There’s no fresh perspective going on and while Keys has a beautiful voice that has a fine range I just didn’t feel the emotional aspect of the lyrics. The time spent between 2007’s As I Am to the release of The Element of Freedom is said to have been a break for Keys, a personal inward look of her own world, idea’s and revelations taken from her own experiences. If your going to be quoted saying as much you need to put it across that way. Either the studio crew manipulated the hell out of the albums personal feel to, let me be honest, get it as close to the commercially successful sound of radio as possible, or it just wasn’t there to begin with.

I think as an album from a veteran artists such as Keys this is a big let down but as a jumping off point for R&B new comers it’s the perfect mix. Its radio friendly, safe, and most importantly of all its popular, probably due more to the success of Keys previous albums and the expectation thereof. No one is going to hate this album so much they wouldn’t recommend it but it would seem the staying power of this album seems, if anything, questionable.