By Ginuwine, 2001

This is full-frontal Ginuwine. The Life has 15 crisp and clean tracks, three ballads, two mercifully brief interludes, and, praises be, only one guest appearance. With the exception of one or two tracks, the album's subject matter crystallizes Ginuwine's shiny digitized persona: the iced-out, ghetto-down-yet-sensitive, pretty-boy player with a pocket full of money. As a flesh-and-blood artist, Ginuwine is a reasonably talented, trend-conscious love man with the ability to turn fairly ordinary songs about two-way pagers, g-strings, and the myriad pressures of being a hard-working sex symbol into Billboard -bound hits. Even though he focuses on adult topics, Ginuwine's songs seem to center around the type of fantasies 15-year-olds indulge in while watching MTV on a school night. Five of these tracks are up-tempo rump shakers and 10 are turbo-charged, up-on-the-downstroke slow jams. The party songs are cluttered with drum and bass, whistles, mediocre Spanish guitars, and other gimmicks that merely distract from Ginuwine's capable midrange vocals. Stick with the slick slow jams, and he might just get your heart racing. --Rebecca Levine

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