Ne-Yo - Year Of The Gentleman (CD)

All Music Guide

Apart from a little more drama, a notion set with the desperate urgency of opening track "Closer," not much makes Year of the Gentleman, NeYo's third album in as many years, all that different from In My Own Words or Because of You. If there are any real shakeups in the songwriter/singer's m.o., they are subtle, not glaring, typically evident only in the production wrinkles brought by his collaborators. Had each album been separated by a few years of inactivity, this lack of change might be an issue, but since breaking out with Mario's "Let Me Love You" in 2004, NeYo has been nothing if not steady and consistent, a constant presence in the RB chart who probably could not devise a gimmick if his career depended upon it unless you hold those natural and often uncanny Michael Jackson vocalisms, as present as ever throughout highlight "Nobody," against him. What makes the album slightly less satisfying than NeYo's first two albums is that the ballads are slightly sappier and overwrought. The odds are in his favor, however, that no one has written a more gorgeous song about slothful selfloathing. That song, "Why Does She Stay," forms the front end of a twotrack patch of glorious gloom the album's center, both literally and figuratively complemented by "Fade into the Background," where he watches the one who got away get married.

- Andy Kellman, All Music Guide