B'Day (deluxe edition)

by

Beyoncé

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Beyonce's original B'day album was a relatively brief collection consisting primarily of rather modern uptempo dance tunes and a handful of really powerful onces too. Even though it's wound up being something of a habit with her in the future she elected to re-release this album a year later with a reconfigured track listing and a bonus disks of extra singles material. It's really surprising how the re ordering of these songs made such a huge difference in how the album came across. That and the addition of the three new songs create a whole new context for these songs and it came off almost as an entirely new album as a result. One of the new songs is "Beautiful Lier" with Shakira,kind of an old school flavored latin pop/funk midtempo tune that's a great way to get things started. The ebb and flow between the the more lush midtempo "Irreplaceable" and the vibrant pop funk stylings "Green Light" and "Kitty Kat",along with the uniquelly textured keyboards and chord changes are amazing in terms of the re-ordering and almost play out as a suite. "Welcome To Hollywood" and "Flav's And All" are two places where the concepts of latin soul-pop and hip-hop influences both work very well alongside the other. There are still a couple very stereotypical hip-hop/R&B songs here I'm not personally crazy about in "Upgrade" and "Ring The Alarm" which,interesting enough was a hit but again in the way this is restructured that aren't very intrusive at all,even for hip-hop naysayers. The ballads "Still In Love" and "Listen" from Dreamgirls both look very much towards Beyonce's next album to come much as does "Get Me Bodied" with it's heavy South African style funk beat which anticipates "Single Ladies" to a huge degree in hindsight. Of course even this album still cannot keep the very heavily funky splatters of "Suga Mama" and "Freakum Dress" in check but again because this version of this album is arranged more in the pattern of your typical 70's funk/R&B/soul album they again get a more vital showing this time out. Most of the second disk is Spanish remixes and such aside from "Amor Gitano" with Aleiandro Fernandaz which not only maintains the latin vibe but is sung in Spanish as well. This is a perfect example how sometimes simply the reconfiguration of songs,even without the addition of new material can give new life to an album that may not have originally seemed as powerful. Now it doesn't always work but in this case it worked wonders.