Ashanti's 'Rose': Sweet Yet Thorny

A singer, actress, pitchwoman and sometime poet, Ashanti may be best known as the public face of the much-maligned, oft-investigated record label formerly known as Murder Inc. Sweet-voiced and dewily virginal, even when she's trying not to be, Ashanti has an alliance with ostensibly ominous figures like label head Irv Gotti and Ja Rule that has always lent her a sort of proximate edginess -- dangerous, yet not -- and "Concrete Rose" doesn't tinker much with that formula.

The singer's third album (not counting last year's "Ashanti's Christmas") is, like its predecessors, an entertaining, consistently middlebrow R&B disc with hip-hop aspirations. Ashanti (the "Rose" of the title) provides a seemingly endless procession of honeyed ballads; a fleet of hip-hop producers (including Gotti, 7 Aurelius and, yes, Jimi Kendrix) provide the "Concrete," usually by way of assorted club bangers (the Ja Rule duet "Turn It Up"), guest rappers and thumping bass lines.

"Concrete Rose" is unofficially split into three parts: great would-be singles, undisguised filler and skits in between. With 17 songs shoehorned into an average-length album, it's both better and duller than the singer's previous efforts, with more of everything -- especially padding -- to go around. Most of the disc's second half consists of hookless R&B tracks that only serve to emphasize the slightness of the whole endeavor. The skits are pretty painful, too, a motley collection of answering machine messages ("Buck 3000"), awkward banter ("Sister Stories") and fan-base pandering ("Message to the Fans").

But the disc's first half is frequently amazing, a collection of lush hip-hop soul assembled by a production crew that clearly knows its musical history: There are lovingly applied Club Nouveau samples, sumptuous '70s slow jams, rock guitar and limpid sort-of-electronica.

The album's opening triple punch is as compelling as anything R&B has produced all year: the atmospheric, keyboard-intensive "Only U"; "Focus," a weird, winning experiment in early '80s pop; and "Still Down," a mid-tempo duet with rapper T.I. that may be the sweetest now-that-I'm-out-of-jail-will-you-have-sex-with-me? song ever ("I know you been missing the kissing / And them different positions," T.I. says by way of inducement).

Ashanti, 24, is billed as a co-writer on every track, and the album finds her slowly morphing from a cosseted R&B princess to a partially formed adult. She seems sturdier here, less kittenish, though she still doesn't have enough presence to warrant those frequent comparisons to Mary J. Blige (who, one suspects, uses girls like Ashanti as toothpicks).

On the atypically fiery "Freedom," Ashanti declares war on haters ("The more you give the more they want, and they ain't happy. . . . They don't appreciate it until you walk away" -- a declaration of independence that's just the sort of thing that tends to make handlers nervous). While Ashanti has yet to make her "Butterfly," the album where she declares emancipation from producers, Svengalis and parents/managers, it seems an inevitable next step. At the rate she's going -- four albums in two years -- one suspects she'll get to it sooner rather than later.