She has a voice nearly the equal of Mary J Blige, a prodigiously tattooed right breast, and a career as one of the leading female singers on the R&B/hip-hop interface. But still, the presence of her late husband Biggie Smalls haunts Faith Evans. Her only real UK hit to date remains the risible Biggie tribute, 'I'll Be Missing You'; a record that has done as much of a disservice to her frequently excellent music as it did to that of Sean 'Puff Daddy/P Diddy' Combs.
Hopefully, 'Faithfully' will change all that - although the confusion and prevarication over its UK release date hardly suggest Arista are confident of its success here. Evans' third album begins predictably enough, with the Biggie-sampling 'Alone In This World' co-produced by the still-hovering P Diddy. But the real surprise is the latter's cracking form on 'Faithfully' - especially the superbly slick, jazz-tinged 'Do Your Time', a track some of the neophytes drawn to R&B by Alicia Keys would do well to check out. On an album long on production and songwriting credits, but unusually short on guest stars, the Didster even turns in a rap to complement Evans' rich, unshowy vocals on the tom-tom-driven stand-out single, 'You Gets No Love'.
Rather predictably, Evans gets a little bogged down in ballads as the album progresses. But, much like Mary J's fine 'No More Drama' from last year, it's the easy thump of 'Faithfully' that endures. Producer spotters will be pleased, if not altogether surprised, to find a Neptunes track - the perfunctory 'Burnin' Up' - somewhere amidst these unnecessarily generous 18. But the plaudits are won by lower-profile producers: Battlecat, for the Stevie Wonder-style funk-baroque of the title track; Michaelangelo Saulsberry for the aforementioned 'You Gets No Love', and especially for his awesome name; and Mario 'Yellow Man' Winans, who assists P Diddy on several choice cuts, not least the Indeep-sampling nu-disco of 'Back To Love' (a companion piece to Janet Jackson's 'All For You', ostensibly).
It's an album, then, that carries its class and cares as an unusually light load. The only real drawback is that for all of Evans' presence and the sterling work of her producers, most of the tunes measure up as pleasant, but not quite memorable. Which raises the unpalatable fact that, whilst every single one of these songs are aesthetically superior, you can understand why they'll never be as big as the Police-sampling atrocity of 'I'll Be Missing You'. Life's cruel, as she well knows, but so are the realities of the music biz.
