CIARA'S NEW ALBUM BASIC INSTINCT IS A BOMB! SHE CAN'T REALLY HOLD A NOTE BUT SHE SURE CAN GO LOW! LOL!

You have to hand it to Ciara. It took genuine nerve for her to title her new CD after the movie "Basic Instinct," ­drawing inspiration from Sharon Stone's ice-pick-wielding, man-eater of a character.
In fact, Ciara represents the polar opposite of that hard, cool S&M fantasy. With her breathy coo of a voice, she implies utter compliance, a dreamy plaything primed to do your bidding.

Commercially, that character has struck a counterprogramming nerve. While her contemporaries Keyshia Cole, Jennifer Hudson, Jazmine Sullivan and Chrisette Michele feature booming voices of authority, Ciara suggests a soft-spoken pussycat, a prefeminist throwback.

Not that this role is entirely voluntary (or even intentional). It's just that the 25-year-old former model hasn't much assertion in her voice to begin with. Instead, she recalls the flintier R&B females of the '90s: Ashanti, Tweet and Janet Jackson.

That retro character debuted on Ciara's "Goodies," which, in 2004 helped usher in the brief trend in crunk 'n' R&B. She sold just as well on 2006's dubiously titled "Ciara: The Evolution." But when the singer tried to genuinely evolve, on her last CD, 2009's "Fantasy Ride," she bombed.

"Basic Instinct" means to return Ciara to the uptempo dance tracks of her more successful days, a style that falls in line with the more rhythmically adroit R&B pop of now. That style elevated the first single, "Ride," into the top five, gaining extra traction from a video smutty enough to get banned from BET. The cut also retreats to Ciara's formula of acting the pliant love slave to a hot rapper (in this case, serial collaborator Ludacris).

Unfortunately, few other tracks have that frisson. That's not entirely Ciara's fault. When you have a voice this bare, it's up to your writer/producers to make the records hit. But overseers C. (Tricky) Stewart and Terius (The Dream) Nash haven't found riffs, or beats, steely enough to play off Ciara's slack tones. That lack of contrast pushes her disk across a sad line -- from soft-sell R&B to mush.



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