Since she sounds good and the band sounds good, this works pretty well on a sheer sonic level - it's good late-night mood music - but there's no sense of storytelling or momentum to her performances: she starts the song in one place and stays there riding in circles until the end. Nowhere is this more evident than her version here of Prince's 'How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore' (which she straightens out and truncates to 'How Come You Don't Call Me') where she speeds along to the bridge after singing the first verse, then just dispenses with the song altogether, spending the rest of the time vamping, occasionally going back to the bridge. This, more than either Songs in A Minor or The Diary, illustrates why Alicia Keys fits into the post-hip-hop soul world: she places groove and feel above the song. But that's not the only way Unplugged differs from Keys' other two albums. Certainly, Keys and her 16 supporting musicians are professionals and they deliver tight, polished grooves, giving her plenty of space to improv and vamp, which is in contrast to her controlled studio albums. Unlike the early installments of the MTV series, which focused on a performer accompanied only with an acoustic guitar, resulting in unsurprisingly simple affairs, Alicia Keys' Unplugged is big, splashy, and immodest - even if her guitarist is playing acoustic and she plays a piano, not a synth, the extra vocalists, horn section, strings, and full rhythm section complete with electric bass makes this anything but 'unplugged.' But that doesn't really matter, since this is presented and marketed as a live album more than an acoustic record, and, as a live album, it's OK. Buy the album Starting at £12.99įorget that it's awfully hard to call this live recording Unplugged. Purchase and download this album in a wide variety of formats depending on your needs.

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