After a career spanning nine albums, sixteen number one hits, seven Dove Awards and a decade in the music industry, Jaci Velasquez finds herself at a career crossroads. Never one to stray very far from the well-worn path of positive-minded pop and tearjerker power ballads, Velasquez could always count on her albums to top the sales chart and peak in the premiere position at radio. Though she'd been cruising ever since arriving on the scene in 1996, the year 2003 ushered in a brand new experience for the Christian pop star:
Unspoken wasn't a smash success. Though it sold well considering the album's poorly chosen singles weren't supported by radio as fiercely as previous ones had been, Velasquez has since admitted
Unspoken wasn't the artistic progression it should have been. She now had some catching up to do. Finding new inspiration in such offbeat and critically acclaimed artists as the Cardigans, Leona Naess, the Flaming Lips and others in the dream pop / art rock sphere, Velasquez called upon British indie producer Martin Terefe (Ron Sexsmith, KT Tunstall) to help craft her musical reinvention. Gone are the Spanish pop-flavored uptempos and slick faceless ballads. Also absent is Velasquez's trademark interpretative way with words. At first, it's hard to consider this a welcomed change, as she no longer has her most striking strength on her side and this newly adapted approach hardly seems worn in enough to make Velasquez stand out among her peers. It may be a bit of a shock to the system at first, but Velasquez's imperfect vocal performances breathe a refreshing authenticity into these numbers. No longer searching for the next perfect note, she does an admirable job using her voice as an extension of the lyrical content. Despite the happy jangle of opener "I'm Not Looking Down," Velasquez sounds worn out while admitting she's just
waiting for the world to come and let me down. The delicate piano ballad "Lay It Down" is equally effective, as her performance grows in power right along with her increasing trust in the unknown.
The soft rock of "Something Beautiful," which includes in its opening verse perhaps Velasquez's finest performance to date, the stirring and irresistibly upbeat GlassByrd cover "Tonight" (featuring Clarkesville's Michael Clarke) and the socially conscience electropop of "Reason to Believe" are highlights. Beauty's thirty-nine minutes are an almost entirely fluffy, feel-good affair, consistently lacking much of anything that resembles a darker edge. And that's okay. Velasquez's one major attempt at roughing up her vocal approach proves she belongs in the adult alternative genre, as her forced mangling of the words is just as believable as Ashlee Simpson trying to rawk. As it turns out, Beauty Has Grace probably won't send Velasquez's dedicated fan base shrieking into the night, but it might leave more than a few with a confused expression across their face. It's still very much a pop-oriented album, just with a more interesting musical palette to work with this time around. Nothing here is as dynamic as Crystal Clear's "You're Not There," but Beauty Has Grace can be firmly established as Velasquez's strongest collection yet. Though Velasquez's songwriting is in need of much development before she can be compared to the artists she is so fond of, Grace indicates that this shift in style couldn't have been a wiser decision. But she's not there yet. This truly is a transitional record, as it moves a bit too far from the Top 40 formula to garner much radio play yet keeps things too safe to interest indie listeners. Though its ambitions may not be enough to interest fans of the music that inspired it, Beauty Has Grace proves Velasquez's career might just be entering the most interesting era of it.
