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After a nearly four-year absence from recording, Toni Braxton returns with The Heat, her third album. Full of drama--sometimes melodrama--it unsurprisingly puts Braxton's rich voice and command of nuance front and center of one state-of-the-art track after another. Unfortunately, The Heat plays up her taste for ballads to such a point that the disc bores itself into a quiet-storm rut. The big exception is the Rodney Jerkins-produced first single, "He Wasn't Man Enough." The song's smoldering rebuff and Jerkins's measured funk make a perfect match for Braxton's matter-of-fact hauteur. She also delivers a tough take on reality with "Just Be a Man About It," which pits her against Dr. Dre in a breakup scenario that carries much more force than weightless trifles such as the filler sex-me-up "The Art of Love" and Diane Warren's "Spanish Guitar." --Bob Roget