Mariah Carey’s Me. I Am Mariah… The Elusive Chanteuse, reviewed by a former Mimi skeptic.

Mariah Carey makes me nervous. Carey is nowhere near as uncool as Dion, and a fair sight more fun, though she’s never been exactly hip either; with her, I might have focused on the virtues of big, shameless pop gestures—of “schlock” rather than schmaltz, as Rosen did this week in his epic piece for New York magazine. They’re both chronically gaffe-prone personalities, and, above all, both the vessels for and servants of their own Idol-worshipped elephantine “pipes”—Dion’s like a church organ and Carey’s more like a digital synth, especially way up in her legendary “whistle register.” Indeed, one of her best tricks, which shows up often on her new record, is to blend voice and backing instruments so you have to lean in to tell them apart, as if her vocal cords enfold a whole one-woman band. Carey’s 2005 comeback The Emancipation of Mimi roughly coincided with my aesthetic emancipation, and with it came her single greatest triumph, “We Belong Together.” That was really my first Mariah album, and it retroactively rewrote our relationship: I now allowed for her importance as reflexively as I’d once dismissed it. The rest is a smorgasbord of midtempo ballads, including a thin cover of George Michael’s “One More Try,” a couple that suffer from the melodic meandering that’s always been my Mariah bugbear, and the squirm-making “Supernatural,” which is smeared all over with Carey’s toddler twins’ cooing, a class of move that Beyoncé can pull off but Mariah never will.