THE R&B QUEEN DOES NOT DISSAPOINT WITH HER NEW ALBUM STRONGER WITH EACH TEAR!

As a singer, Mary J. Blige has never been big on structure or discipline. She prefers to throw her voice around a tune like a lasso, surrounding it with so many whoops and wails, grunts and bellows that, by the time she's through, every possible emotion from the song has been wrung dry.
For all Blige's talk about wanting "no more drama" in her life, she makes high theater of her music, boring into an emotion so full and cathartic it borders on the Greek.

Yet on "Stronger With Each Tear," the star's ninth studio disk, she holds herself in rare check. For the most part, she sticks to the tune as written, standing blithely by to let the hooks and melodies upstage her. It's the first Blige CD you actually call pithy.

So, is this reason for grousing or joy?

Luckily, the latter wins the day.

Certainly, the new tidiness makes "Stronger" stand out from a huge body of work that has often veered into the indulgent − an especially troublesome tendency early in the singer's career, when her relationship with pitch was glancing at best. It also helps that, this time, Blige gets to sing some of the sturdiest and most fetching melodies yet written for her. They're studded with bright hooks and goosed with rhythms primed to make you move.

Better, toward the CD's close, Blige rewards the patient by blowing out some of the most colorful and high-flying vocal fireworks of her career.

But first, we're treated to work that's surprisingly concise and upbeat. That applies to both pace and tone. We're nine tracks in before the music slows for a ballad. In the meantime, Blige shows unprecedented confidence in a song like "The One," a salute to her often thwarted swagger. In "Good Love," she goes further, playing sexual aggressor to no less hot a stud than T.I. In case you miss the overall mood, one song takes the title "I Feel Good."

To match it, many of the songs sound more like tight singles than the usual, loose vehicles for Blige's vocal flourishes. Cuts like "Tonight," with its muffled shuffle of a hook, and "Said and Done," with its focus on the beat, sound more like hits from lighter R&B singers such as Ciara or Ashanti than something from the queen of hip-hop soul.

But if Blige sounds like she's holding back for three quarters of the CD, by the time we get to a track like the '60s soul stirrer "Kitchen," she starts to cook. By the next track, "In the Morning," she's on high boil, pitching one of her most wrenching "and-I'm-telling-you-I'm-not-going" outbursts, only to top that with "I Can See in Color," a hymn to appreciating life late in the game that she sings to the very limits of her abilities.

The rest of the CD may not approach that level of depth or grandeur. But at this point, Blige has earned the right to be light.If anything, the restraint only makes her final wails that much more worthy of awe.