While other of her contemporaries fell aside long ago, always poised and elegant Dionne Warwick keeps her head above the water with style, even though big recording companies are not behind her now - as usual, ageism promotes fresh faces to a teenage audiences, completely ignoring the fact that veterans are still alive & well and have lost none of their talent.
The case in point is Warwick who once was best-selling artist with classic music legacy behind her. She was the muse behind best work by Burt Bacharach and amassed some nice pop hits later in 1970s and 1980s but her mellow pop somehow got pushed aside with rap and what not. This album tries valiantly to prove that Warwick is still contemporary singer, even if this means re-recording some of her older material in a new modern arrangements. In most of the cases this means that new versions don't bring anything really earth-shattering, exceptions are completely re-imaniged and joyful "Always Something There To Remind Me" that wouldn't be out of place on Paul Simon's "Graceland" album and "Do You Know The Way To San Jose?" dressed up in tropical clothes. These two songs works so well that one wonders why producers were not so brave with the rest of Warwick's pop classics instead of keeping them more or less the same. To beef up the album we also have handful of new ballads that present all the magic of Warwick's still magic, husky voice that now sounds deeper than ever before (I always preferred her mature voice to a young 1960s Warwick). New songs are all very pretty and show that Warwick don't need any "modernization" to keep her interesting as she sounds most comfortable in slow-burning ballads, the best of the bunch being probably "All Kinds Of People" that I remember from a Jerry Butler old album, truly a soulful gem with a spiritual meaning and without any vocal excess popular today. Ending on a spiritual note, "Humbly I Pray" is a gentle gospel song that tells a lot about mature Warwick at this point in her life and career.
I might not be so enamored with re-recordings of old hits but love new material.
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