Review: Christina Milian, It’s About Time

Upon seeing the racy back cover of Christina Milian’s sophomore effort (her first to be released in the U.S.), a colleague of mine sighed, “She’s all grown up,” to which I replied, “And taking adult-sized dumps.” It’s About Time is certainly not the worst album of the year, but it’s pretty damn crappy. Milian joins the ranks of other reedy-voiced pop singers like Paula Abdul (“I Need More”), Ashanti (“Someday One Day”), and Jennifer Lopez, for whom the Cuban-American Milian penned the dance hit “Play” in 2001. Even the utterly un-sexy album version of the lead single “Dip It Low,” the far-superior dance remix of which is garnering significant airplay in major markets across the country, calls attention to the song’s inherent flaws: Championing the art of oral sex may seem daring but it just ends up sounding downright regressive (“It’s late at night/He’s comin’ home/Meet him at the door with nothing on”). The short-term legacy of Kelis’s minimalist, metaphor-rich “Milkshake” can be found on the stomach-churning “Peanut Butter & Jelly,” while “Highway” adds another lemon to R&B’s canon of souped-up car songs—of all the atrocities R. Kelly has committed (and I’m just referring to the professional ones), “You Remind Me of Something” a.k.a. “You Remind Me of My Jeep” remains the most pervasive. Of course, like Ashanti and J. Lo before her, Milian and company contribute some guilty pleasure ear candy: the funk-infused “Whatever U Want,” “I’m Sorry,” and the Rodney Jerkins-produced “Get Loose,” which, despite sounding like a J. Lo outtake, will likely keep Milian a mainstay at the clubs this summer after “Dip It Low” has run its course.