“One” steals the lush string arrangement from Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy.” Aha, give his kid a gig and that gives Macy the right to raid the Cole family vault. Grey adopts a coquettish delivery -- she’s Eartha Kitt and viola, it fits! “One” is a sandy, cutie pie love letter from a woman who probably doesn’t mate with humans, but kitschy dementia suits her alien personality. The strings give the song its romantic feel, but this isn’t a serious heartbreaking romance, this is goofy fun.

It’s back to soul Christina Aguilera style in “I’m So Glad You’re Here.” Every word of the title is enunciated by the back up singers “I’m….So...Glad…You’re…Here.” But once again it’s the back up singers, (who’ve now coalesced like an intergalactic version of En Vogue), that save the day. Maybe they should’ve been singing this stuff instead of Macy, who goes a bit overboard with the assorted ecstatic helium yelps. And guest star Fergie isn’t give much else to do but wail in the distance. For all she does, she might as well have been Sarah Ferguson.

The choppy Bernard Purdie drum beat in “Slowly” help put it in the plus column. Even Macy’s Muppet voice slips into the song’s can’t miss groove. She can’t sing a lick, but Macy’s got a talent for wrapping her torturous tones around an arrangement. You can practically see her swaying side to side in the studio as she recorded this. This is Macy doing Aretha and Sly on helium.

“Ghetto Love” sample’s the intro from James Brown’s “It’s A Man’s World.” The body’s not even cold and the vultures are tearing up the Godfather Of Soul’s music. “Ghetto Love” is disastrous from the ghetto go. On previous tunes the backbeat had been Macy’s friend. In “Ghetto Love” the drum track is at war with the rest of the arrangement. As if the spastic beat isn’t enough, there’s a bunch of homies in the background actually spelling out the word ghetto letter by letter, just in case it shows up in a Times crossword or in a spelling bee. And there’s an inevitable rapid fire say-nothing, rhyme for the sake of rhyme rap by Nas. Sorry, Macy, it may still indeed be a man’s world.

The drums are back on track in “OK”. Excuse the “Johnny Comes Marching Home” intro and outro -- the rest is pure dance floor material. Macy starts out funneling Frankie Valli, shifts to Eartha Kitt, and goes on like a squirrelly Melanie Brown of the Spice Girls for a stanza or two. “Slowly” is a song about Macy’s man ditching her and her kid (“Now it’s just me and the kid after all you did, I’m okay.”) My guess is there was no contest. The father didn’t want to have to sit through this song in order to get custody. It’s a nice trick, however, when Macy groans “Let me hear my baby holler,” and a bunch of school kids respond “la la la la la.”

“Get Out” is Macy doing Prince mixing in punk with an attitude. “Get out, get out, she’s don’t love you, Macy don’t love you no more.” Thank God, I was worried. This is Macy channeling Jodie Foster channeling Nell and there’s more grave robbing of James Brown’s reputation with a few “Good Gawds” for bad measure. Justin Timberlake is participating somewhere in the mix, probably hoping for another wardrobe malfunction. “Get Out” while you can.

Reggae meets Madonna meets New Wave, with plenty of synthesized blips and gurgles in “Treat Me Like Your Money”. Macy steals the line “You spin me right round like a record right round” from Dead or Alive. If you think Macy’s a space cadet, the guy that fronted that band (Pete Burns) had some real issues. There’s another rap break, this time from will.i.am that’s better than the last, but it’s still unnecessary and incongruous.

“Everybody” has an 80s dance floor atmosphere with a little disco high hat thrown in – just in case you forgot how repetitive music from that era could be. “Everybody” works because the background singers are allowed to drown out Macy on the chorus, and she doesn’t so much sing as recite. Still, the repetition works, even if it does begin to sound like a Jane Fonda exercise video.

Macy calls her act what it is with “Strange Behavior.” “We were happily married until he waved a gun at me, I said what’s with all your strange behavior? He said I love you baby, but you’ve got a big insurance policy and I really need the paper.” If Harry Nilsson wrote the soundtrack to “The Godfather” while on acid it would sound something like this. It’s not a bad comedy routine, just a bad song.

It’s hard to completely dislike a CD that has such a wide variety of “strange behavior.” With the exception of the out-of-left-field raps, the music is fresh, creative and highly danceable. The drawback is Macy’s sista from another planet voice. Most of the time she sounds like she’s been sucking on a bottle of Ripple since birth. Her diction is slurred, her voice is charred and she gurgles, yelps, snorts and squawks like a she’s undergoing shock therapy. She’s careless about how she sounds one moment and then tries waaaaay too hard the next. Restraint, Macy, restraint. I’ll admit I like my singers to have a solid timbre in their deliveries (like Jim Capaldi, James Dewar, Miler Anderson or Corey Wells to name a few), but every once in while I’ll come across a singer who has a unique delivery with plenty of character (such as Mike Harrison, Joe Cocker or even Bon Scott – now there’s a character!). Macy Gray falls in the latter category – a singer whose bizarre delivery is part of what she is. What she’s missing is even a remote sense of pitch, but that never stopped Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young or Tom Waits – and I like Neil. Maybe Macy’s voice won’t bother you, but I curl up in a fetal position every time I hear it. Fans of the sista from another planet will give “Big” an astronomical rating. The only “Big” thing about Macy Gray is the size of the net that’s going to be needed to return her to Bellevue.

Posted March 29, 2007 Permalink