Ben Ratliff NYTimes A young R&B singer from Philadelphia, Jade Alston, has made a first mixtape (“Single on a Saturday Night,” for streaming or download at jadealston.com) that alternates between wholly new songs with “she-mixes”: her rewritten versions of songs by men, including Lil Wayne’s “Bill Gates,” Wiz Khalifa’s “Up” (redone with more passion and open space as “More Than Friends”), and J. Cole’s “In the Morning.” Her persona is mostly familiar: romantic but self-reliant, self-empowered, girl’s-girl trustworthy, with a counterpoint of self-torture. (There’s the beginning of a narrative here about loneliness and looking for love in wrong places.) Her musical identity isn’t fully formed yet, but she’s got a voice that sounds timely right now, especially on the title track and “Searching”: smoothed out and breathy, in Toni Braxton’s general area, never strobing in your ear, sometimes even self-effacing.
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