Jennifer Lopez
This is Me . . . Then


Mariah Carey
Charmbracelet


Martine McCutcheon
Musicality


ON HER NEW album, Jennifer Lopez has cannily mixed her real life romance with her music. So listening to This is Me . . . Then (Epic) feels a little like snooping on Lopez, albeit with the singer letting us see only the glossiest parts of her private life.

The terrible title hints at what’s in store. This is Me . . . Then is a snapshot of a happy, in-love Lopez, who — so rumours say — will marry the actor Ben Affleck on Valentine’s Day. Fans who want to get closer to Lopez will be delighted. Those who prefer the Bronx babe when she’s shakin’ her rump may want to pass.

More than half of the 13 songs are soulful odes to Affleck, including The One, a sassy reworking of the Stylistics’ early 1970s hit You Are Everything, and Dear Ben, a strings-backed ballad that proves Lopez can sing, although she’s still no Mariah. She handles the jazzy, piano-bar ballad Again pretty well but trips up by trying to bawl like Whitney on the gruesome I♥U!.

The first single, Jenny from the Block, is a clever, catchy track with nonsense lyrics about Lopez still being a simple girl — “Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got,” she sings, flashing an engagement ring that she claims cost $2 million — while the future hit All I Have is a funky, Janet Jackson-style track with an LL Cool J rap track about her former husband Cris Judd.

If you’re the type to buy Hello! to hear how Affleck scattered petals throughout Lopez’s house before he proposed, This is Me . . . Then is an album you’ll enjoy. If not, stick with the singles and giggle when Lopez’s love life falls apart all over again next year.

Like Lopez, Mariah Carey begins her cheesily titled new album, Charmbracelet (Mercury), her first since Glitter, the flop soundtrack to her flop movie, by putting the past behind her. Through the Rain, a sweet slowie, is about picking herself up and starting again. Musically, however, it’s the past Carey is trying to return to. Not the recent past, but the mid-1990s, when she was the new Whitney Houston. The good news is that those who loved Carey then will love her again. Out have gone the hip-hop/pop tracks that alienated middle America and back in have come the big ballads and that still astonishing, multi-octave voice.

Thankfully, Carey only gets mawkish on the power ballads My Saving Grace, I Only Wanted and Bringin’ on the Heartbreak, a dramatic, strings-drenched production with bits of blues guitar that teeters on Celine Dion territory but sounds like a huge hit-in-waiting. The rest is mostly midtempo tunes about love.

Finally, there are a couple of funky, uptempo tunes, ripe for a remix, including the playful, Rose Royce-sampling I’m Going Down.

Martine McCutcheon, still only 25, spent the first few years of her fame as a real-life soap star and the past few living a soap-star-style life. Now she is having another stab at the charts, only this time she’s playing it safe.

Musicality (Virgin) is an album of show songs — or just showy songs. Backed by a full orchestra, McCutcheon trills her way through obvious choices such as Wouldn’t it be Luvverly? from My Fair Lady and Wishing You Were Here Again from Phantom of the Opera, as well as several Judy Garland/Liza Minnelli hits, a bizarre selection from films such as Grease and Fame, Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend, some Sinatra and even Abba.

They’re all McCutcheon’s favourites, of course, and her voice is well suited to show tunes. But she isn’t A-list enough to make Musicality anything more than an entertaining karaoke album. Or an excuse for the ITV1 special coming up tomorrow evening at 9.20pm.