Veteran (CD - 2007)

This set of breezy, melodic R&B sounds fresh enough to belie Marques Houston's 10-plus years in the music business. The honey-voiced singer got his start in the mid-1990s with the R&B boy band Immature, and raised expectations with his 2003 solo debut, MH, and its follow up, 2005's NAKED. VETERAN has a more stripped-down sound than its predecessors, but it retains the singer's confident yet sensitive approach on smooth after-hours jams like "Favorite Girl" and the sexy "How You Just Gonna."

At the age of 25, Marques Houston considers himself a veteran. OK: roughly 15 years, from Immature's 1992 debut to Veteran, constitutes longevity in any field. It's also worth noting that Houston is one of very few R&B artists with mainstream appeal who first appeared during the early '90s. Though he has dressed this album as something of a significant occasion, it is not a great progression from 2005's Naked, but it is a progression nonetheless. There's a similar distribution of sexually forward roughneck tracks and heart-on-sleeve testimonies, with plenty of material that falls somewhere between the two extremes, but the overall quality of the songwriting and production work is greater than that of Naked and MH. After working beneath the surface, you can even hear Houston sound a little more like a mature adult -- "Pop That Booty" seems like a distant memory -- and he works the more romantic sentiments with enough conviction to indicate that he has more life experiences from which to draw. Several past collaborators are involved, including Rufus Blaq and the Underdogs, and Houston also teams up again with Ne-Yo (who co-wrote MH highlight "That Girl") on "Wonderful," one of the album's several standouts. ~ Andy Kellman minimize