Their output zigzagged wildly between intense ballads destined to become standards – Words, To Love Somebody, I've Gotta Get a Message to You – and baroque pop-psychedelia with imponderable lyrics about racing drivers and fridges.
Obviously, with "Secret Of Life" and "Since You Asked," those are pretty intense ballads.
Rainbow mixed hip hop and R&B-flavored upbeat songs with softer and lyrically intense ballads resembling those that Carey had previously recorded.
And there was also his own "Magnolia," perhaps the best three minutes of the evening, a quietly intense rubato ballad built of oozing long-tones and Brandee Younger's harp arpeggios: it was where contemporary classical music ran into Dilla and '70s film-soundtrack music.
But so are a far-reaching Duke Ellington medley, a Dixie Chicks country ballad and an intense "My Funny Valentine".
They get close to you, each one becoming kind of intense, one long step beyond ballads.
The band was graceful in ballads, scrappy and intense in collective improvisations, deft with uneven phrases, smart about repertory.
Some songs have a reggae-ish sound; some songs that seem like innocent, sweet ballads morph into a really intense, cinematic soundscape kind of world.
The biggest singles here, "Let's Go Crazy" and "When Doves Cry," will last as long as any pop music of the era; the title song remains his signature ballad; and then there's the intense jealousy ballad "The Beautiful Ones," the propulsive "Computer Blue," the bawdy "Darling Nikki," and the pair of breakneck funk songs that make up the middle of side two, "I Would Die 4 U" and "Baby I'm a Star".
Instead of ups and downs, ballads and rockers, "Agapao" is a weirdly intense party, 15 songs of sophisticated southern-rock trance music, composed with open-tuned guitar and boot heel, adjoining blues and country and heterophonic gospel music.
