Banal Serenader on Mission From Venus

BOBBY BROWN “Bobby”

MCA * * 1/2

During a recent interview on MTV, not-so-revealing superstar Bobby Brown had a rare telling moment, assuring women in the viewing audience that they shouldn’t take his new marriage to Whitney Houston too hard because he still cares for all of his female fans really, really deeply , or pandering words to that effect.

Although he wasn’t referring to his new album, the long-awaited “Bobby,” he might as well have been making his fantasy-prone followers a promise: no messy personal vision or autobiographical content contained therein. Even as a real-life husband, playing the romantic gentleman rogue remains his prerogative.

So, despite the four years since his last album and despite its creator’s having gone through the kind of tabloid-ready experiences bound to shape or break the character of even the least self-defined young man, the cheerfully banal “Bobby” holds none of the narcissistic pretensions of superstar projects by, say, Michael Jackson or Hammer. Instead the album aims merely to give us still more of Brown as sex machine, as sensitive superstud, as simple serenader on a mission from Venus.

As such, “Bobby” makes for a very nice date tape, if hardly the stuff that would live up to the rabid pre-release hyperbole.

It’s also Brown as fashion plate, and not just in the striking variety of booklet poses. With most of the tracks written and helmed by Teddy Riley or hotshots L.A. Reid & Babyface and Daryl Simmons, “Bobby” might rightly be called a producer’s album, showcasing grooves above personality. And if Riley’s new new-jack-swing doesn’t sound like much more than a slight modification of the old new-jack-swing, there’s hardly a track here among the 13 songs that doesn’t sound like a Top 10 contender.

And hardly a track here that we won’t be hard-pressed to recall a decade from now. That’s mostly because, for all his sex-you-up braggadocio, Brown tends to come off as a supremely confident cipher whose woo-woo conviction is all momentary, even when he’s promising more than a one-night stand. The furthest he goes out on an individualistic limb is promising his lover multiple orgasms in “Good Enough”; the most self-revelatory he gets is in the vaguely apologetic “One More Night,” confessing unspecified sins for which he hopes to atone by being allowed a last chance to “love you all night long.”

Still, it goes down smooth enough, with the exception of two disappointing duets in which Brown and his partner can’t connect. “I’m Your Friend,” written by gospel’s usually reliable BeBe Winans and sung with Debra Winans, ends the album on a namby-pamby note. More shocking is the lack of sparks in Brown’s pairing with Houston, “Something in Common,” which sounds as if the newlyweds recorded their parts in separate countries; it generates all the marital heat of Gregg ‘n’ Cher’s “Allman and Woman.”