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Album reviews Music

LAURYN HILL

Rating: N


“They say I’m emotionally unstable,” Lauryn Hill rasps midway through this two-disc Unplugged set. Yeah, people will do that if your first release four years after selling 12 million records is a meandering therapy session where fragile, half-finished songs are interspersed with weepy 12-minute spoken word meltdowns about how the old Lauryn Hill is dead. In her place, we have a born-again Hill who insists that God told her to pick up the guitar, that the music business is Babylon and that life is hard. Hill’s decision to strip away the production and put the focus on the words, not the music, is a bold one, but the reality is that there are very few actual songs here. Hill’s voice is shredded three songs into the 22 track set, and while her desire to grow is impressive, she should’ve kept the experiments at home rather than release a self-help session that makes the breakdowns of Alanis Morissette seem like light entertainment by comparison. Embarrassing.

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