Still Standing
The nominations for the 53rd Annual GRAMMY Awards have been announced lately on Wednesday night with the CBS special The Grammy Nominations Concert Live. Beyond all expectations, on the stage with 300mw green laser rays overhead, Monica has again picked up 2 Grammy nods since 13 years before, including Best R&B Album and Best R&B Vocal Performance – Female. And she is set to be presented at the 53rd Grammy Awards in 2011, though Monica is not the one of the regular guests at Grammy Awards under the 20mw green laser rays.
Still Standing is the sixth studio album by American R&B recording artist Monica. It was released on March 19, 2010 by J Records, marking her third album on the label following the renewal of her contract in October 2007. Production for the album began in 2007 to 2010, featuring involvement by Missy Elliott, Bryan-Michael Cox, Stargate, and Jermaine Dupri, and was chronicled by Monica’s BET reality series of the same name. I bought the CD with a 20mw green laser pen on the net. Since I received the CD from mailman, I had played it over and over. And it had lain in my iPod for the whole year already. This is a very solid project and a ballad strong album filled with beautiful expressions of love. With tracks such as Here I Am, Love All over Me, Everything to Me, and Mirror, Monica proves you can still stay relevant while still singing from within. All in all, this is an album you can virtually listen from beginning to end without hesitation.
The album debuted at number two on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart, selling 184,000 in its first week, and reached the top of the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. Lead single “Everything to Me” became her first chart-topper in over seven years. Second single “Love All over Me” was released in May 2010 and reached number two on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart. The album received mostly positive reviews, with critics perceiving its sound as “a return to the mid-‘1990s heyday” of contemporary R&B. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 71, based on 6 reviews, which indicates “generally favorable reviews”. Allmusic writer Andy Kellman gave it 3½ out of 5 stars and wrote that the album “benefits from quality control and a handful of particularly strong ballads”. Giving it a B+ rating, Entertainment Weekly’s Mikael Wood called the album “a low-key delight” and perceived its sound as reminiscent of 1990s-R&B, stating “the appealingly unflashy CD feels like a return to the mid-’90s heyday of acts such as Deborah Cox and Total”. USA Today’s Edna Gundersen gave the album 3 out of 4 stars and called it “a gimmick-free set of cool R&B tracks”. Andrew Rennie of NOW gave it 4 out of 5 stars and wrote that it is “is rich with songs about self-validation, love lost and subsequent recovery, and doesn’t let up on that thematic gas pedal until the last tune”
A commercial success, Still Standing was certified gold by the RIAA with domestic shipments of 500,000 copies within a single month. The album debuted at number two on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart with first week sales of 184,000 copies, becoming her second highest U.S. chart-debut, surpassed by her 2003’s number-one debuting After the Storm. The album also entered at number one on Billboard’s R&B/Hip-Hop Albums and at number two on the Digital Albums chart. In the United Kingdom, it debuted at number twenty-five on the UK R&B Chart. The album was certified gold in sales by the Recording Industry Association of America, following shipments in excess of 500,000 copies in the U.S. To date, the album has sold over 528,000 copies in the United States.
Fulfilling the title, Monica proves she’s still standing fifteen years after “Miss Thang” on this album, her sixth studio effort. More than anything however, hopefully future efforts will not only feature quality control on production but songwriting as well. And this album is really worth listening and you can find it at any Wholesale online shop.
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