Album: India Arie

Voyage to India, Motown

As by far the most interesting of the current crop of nu-soul divas, this second album from India Arie has come to assume huge importance in the year and a half since her Acoustic Soul debut began its progress towards two million sales. Recent follow-ups to previous landmark diva debuts didn't augur well: if Voyage to India were as much of a damp squib as Macy Gray's The Id or as unlistenable as Lauryn Hill's MTV Unplugged No 2.0, it might safely be assumed that the genre would retrench to the narrow, mannerist approach of Whitney, Mariah and Celine, with mere technique in the ascendant, and the style effectively emptied of deeper meaning.

One needn't have worried. Voyage to India represents a confident development of the basic themes of Arie's debut, strengthened by roadwork with the band whose inventive support earns them co-writer credits on most tracks. Thankfully, she remains unconcerned with the exhibitionist mannerisms of diva-soul: the album credits even include thanks to backing vocalist Kerisha Hicks, Arie letting her shoulder the more flamboyant duties while she herself gets on with providing a secure, expressive core to the songs.

Although there's no single track that stands out in the way that "Video" did on Acoustic Soul, that's more due to the overall excellence of the material than the lack of potential hits. As on her debut, the subject-matter is dominated by the need for emotional honesty and self-determination, and the desire to get beyond the phony attitudinising and slack morals that bedevil much "urban" music. "You're about to wreck your future running from your past," she advises a friend in "Slow Down", asserting her own authenticity instead in "Little Things" such as her sister singing "Happy Birthday" down the phone. In places, things can get a touch too Oprah, as when she starts "searching for the feminine energy" in "Talk To Her" – though there's no denying the essential truth of her conviction that men should talk to women "like you want somebody to talk to your mama"; or her assertion elsewhere that "You'll never be happy and you'll never be whole/Until you see the beauty in growing old". It's vital, she implies, to regain control of such traditional notions of "respect" from those who have hijacked the concept to excuse resentful violence.

Perhaps the most inspiring thing about Voyage to India is that Arie has devised a fresh musical language appropriate to her concerns, eschewing the terse, confrontational approach of hip hop and bogus lushness of diva-soul for a lighter form of acoustic-guitar-based R&B that operates on a more human scale. As much rural as it is urban, it's a style that's inclusive rather than exclusive, welcoming even when she's at her most sermonising. R&B album of the year so far.