Mary J. Blige – Growing Pains (2007/2019) FLAC

FLAC tracks | R&B, Soul | 76:34 min | 532 Mb

“I’m talkin’ ’bout things I know,” Mary J. Blige wails on “Work That,” the second single and opening track of Growing Pains. The album squeaked into 2007 too late to make best-of lists but otherwise would have stormed its way up several, for sure. She needn’t have hit us with such a pronouncement: In 16 songs that ring as remarkably, unflinchingly true as those on 2005’s landmark The Breakthrough, the queen of hip-hop soul keeps “keeping it real” a specialty. There’s no sense in trying to assign credit for the skin-tight grooves and funked-up retro vibe here; with nine producers padding Blige’s emotion-rich voice and the lyrics she so obviously lives by, what we’re left with is a melange of sounds. But it’s a measure of an artist who has mastered her own identity and left nothing to chance that this, her eighth studio album, comes off so free of wild cards and loose edges. “You ask what love feels like,” she sings on “What Love Is,” one of the disc’s less fierce tracks. “It feels like joy, and it feels like pain, and it feels like sunshine, and it feels like rain,” she continues, answering the question. The album feels the same way, a passel of complex feelings all wrapped up in love. No one knows struggle, heartache, and triumph over mediocrity like Blige. –Tammy La Gorce

Tracklist:
01. Work That
02. Grown Woman
03. Just Fine
04. Feel Like A Woman
05. Stay Down
06. Hurt Again
07. Shake Down
08. Till The Morning
09. Nowhere Fast
10. Roses
11. Fade Away
12. What Love Is
13. Work In Progress (Growing Pains)
14. Talk To Me
15. If You Love Me? (Edited Version)
16. Smoke
17. Come To Me (Peace)
18. Hello It’s Me
19. Mirror

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