(FORTUNE Magazine) – Cherokee I Love You ... Me RCA

Ideally, a great R&B album should beckon you to bed. It should not, however, put you to sleep. This is the conundrum at the heart of I Love You...Me, a low moan of seduction and liberation from New York soulstress Cherokee. On the surface, the album comes equipped with lots of carnal temptations you'd want in a groove manifesto: string arrangements as plush as a boudoir's satin pillows, bass lines that curl back into suggestive blue notes, even an ode to cologne. ("It's that blue bottle afta shave/ That's makin' me cold misbehave.")

After she's snared you, though, Cherokee proves to be a curiously unsatisfying fling. I Love You doesn't bother to provide a melody you could love back, and while Cherokee can sing, her voice has miles to go before it can match up to the leonine roar of Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin, or even neo-soul diva Erykah Badu. Her lyrics are candid and ripe, but they seem to drift sleepily from song to song, without anything to hold on to. Face it, sucker: This relationship is going nowhere. When all the sighs and gasps are over, it feels like a chemist has drained the Spanish fly from I Love You and replaced it with a squirt of valerian root.

--J.G.