Whitney Houston

It takes a while ”“ nearly 25 minutes ”“ for the proverbial Big Whitney Houston Moment to arrive on I Look to You, the singer’s sixth studio album. It’s a doozy, though. ”˜I Didn’t Know My Own Strength’ is a schmaltz-swaddled ballad about spiritual heartiness and succeeding against the odds, full of gusty string-orchestra crescendos and gospel piano chords. Here is the Houston you know: the gale-force balladeer whose megahits like ”˜Greatest Love of All’ combined vocal pyrotechnics, self-help bromides and a distinctly black-female perspective to create a new kind of secular gospel music. Close your eyes, open your ears, and you’re back in 1992.

The thing is, it’s 2009, and I Look to You is Houston’s first album in seven years. There is a whole Beyoncé generation that knows Houston not as a vocal virtuoso with a multi-octave range but as a tabloid fixture whose dissolution has been unfolding in public for years now. I Look to You has been billed as Houston’s comeback, and it’s not much of a stretch to read ”˜I Didn’t Know My Own Strength’ as the album’s autobiographical centerpiece. ”˜I crashed down and I tumbled/But I did not crumble,’ Houston sings.

But, interestingly, this klieg-lit moment is the exception on the new album. I Look to You spends little time looking back. It is a modern soul record, a collection of sleek, often spunky love songs that aim at something more immediate and tangible than nostalgia or catharsis: Houston wants back in the diva stakes.

The mood is set by the lead track, ”˜Million Dollar Bill.’ Co-written by Alicia Keys, it’s a breezy ode to newfound love, with rubbery, high-riding bass, discofied strings and a lyric as buoyant as the beat. A cover of Leon Russell’s ”˜A Song for You’ begins as a meditative piano ballad, but at the 1:30 mark the clouds part, and a sunny Eurodisco beat pours through. Even the songs with slower tempos find Houston in a sweetly sexy frame of mind, embracing her role as a singer of utilitarian babymakin’ anthems. ”˜I know somebody’s gonna make love to this song tonight,’ she coos in the lush ”˜Worth It.’

At 46, Houston is not the singer she once was. Time and hard living have shaved some notes off that amazing range; the clear, bright voice that dominated radio has given way to a huskier tone ”“ less powerful but more sultry. Where her voice once commanded centre stage, she wisely cedes some of the spotlight to her songwriter-producers. And she has hooked up with some ringers: Keys and Swizz Beatz (co-producers of ”˜Million Dollar Bill’), R Kelly, Danja, Akon, Tricky Stewart and Norwegian studio team Stargate, whose spry ”˜Call You Tonight’ is the album’s most purely melodic moment. Wisely, these collaborators don’t try to hip-hop-ify Houston. The beats are more insistent than in the past, but they’re not trying to be single ladies; the songs have a swank adult-contemporary overlay that is distinctively Whitney.

”˜I want you to love me like I never left,’ she pleads in ”˜Like I Never Left,’ a lulling duet with Akon. Is she singing to a lover, or to her fans? Romance comes and goes, men can be replaced. But smash-hit records, pop superstardom, the adulation of millions ”“ that’s the greatest love of all.