Celine Dion - Taking Chances [Bonus DVD] (CD)

All Music Guide

In 2003, Celine Dion began a longterm engagement with Caesars Palace, performing a show based on her 2002 album, A New Day Has Come, at the Las Vegas casino five nights a week. The Vegas show was such a success that the powers that be wound up extending its run, eventually closing the production at the end of 2007, over a year later than originally planned. During these long five years, Dion trickled out some new releases there was a new collection called One Heart that hit the stores the day the whole Sin City affair started, as well as a few Frenchlanguage albums, a document of the live show, and a soundtrack to Anne Geddes baby photographs but she never did a fullfledged, bigscreen sequel to A New Day Has Come. She was saving that for when the Vegas extravaganza wrapped up, and as soon as it was ready to close, Dion was ready with Taking Chances, her first "official" pop album in five years. Never one for subtlety, Celine Dion hammers home that her postVegas years are going to be ...different with the very title of Taking Chances, but she doesn't stop there. Not only is this the time for her to take chances, she's also full of surprises and there's a new day dawning. She sings that "just when you thought you got me figured out," she'll do something unexpected because she's a "chameleon" basically, any rebirth cliché that comes to mind pops up somewhere on Taking Chances, as Celine never lets listeners forget that she is beginning the next grand chapter of her career. In the prerelease push for the album, it was suggested that Dion was, well, taking chances with her music, and her enlisting of Evanescence's Ben Moody to produce and write a couple of tracks, while hiring Linda Perry to write another couple, suggested that this would indeed be a different kind of Celine album. And it is, at least a little bit. Over its long, long 16 tracks, Celine indulges in some glossy electronic beats on "Shadow of Love," flirts with hard rock on the Aldo Novawritten "Can't Fight the Feelin'" (the great Canadian AOR rocker writes three other tunes here, including "A Song for You," which borrows a title from Leon Russell but nothing else), tries to shimmy like Shakira on "Eyes on Me," and even tries to belt out the blues on "That's Just the Woman in Me," written by former Soft Boy Kimberley Rew. Read more Less