Stone has always struck me as a latter-day Gladys Knight, a lady who sings like she knows her way around the church and the high-rise and the rural South, who's comfortable to a fault with conservative soul trappings, not realizing that her best moments come when she steps beyond the mix and indulges her supple voice and emotional credibility in seemingly spontaneous testimony. Having endured enough of a career trough to suffer the indignity of appearing on Celebrity Fit Club a while back, Stone's fourth and latest disc, The Art of Love & War on the reconstituted Stax label, is not her best (I'd opt for Mahogany Soul), but of a self-assured piece with her previous output. There are echoes of Stevie Wonder ("My People"), her stint in the Soul II Soul spinoff Perfect World ("Go Back To Your Life"), Philly soul ("Here We Go Again"), and slow jam romance ("Pop Pop"). Some of them are sure to be mixed in the Stone favorites like Raphael Saadiq's "Brotha" and the shimmering "No More Rain (In This Cloud)" — which borrows a groove and sense of romantic-spiritual uplift from Knight's bag of tricks. It all adds up to R&B-pop with a dash of hip hop that cuts a little deeper than neo-soul.
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