NEW YORK DAILY NEWS (BY JIM FARBER) - 1/5

Carey couldn't have picked a more ironic title for her latest CD. While the singer dubbed it "Confessions of an Imperfect Angel," much of the disc strives for a perfectionism you'd expect of someone caught in the dark grip of O.C.D.

From the treatment of the vocals, to the strategy of the songwriting, to the use of instrumentation, "Angel" reeks of idealization and self-consciousness.

That's most obvious in the way the producers dealt with Carey's signature feature - her voice. Rarely do we hear it clearly. Nearly every syllable sounds like it's been tricked up by a war room full of compressors, echo-chambers, filters, audio-tuners, and God knows what other contraptions too much time and money can buy.

At the start of the opening cut "Betcha Gon Know," Carey's voice gets flattened into an affectless monotone that makes her sound like Hal from "2001." In "Why Are You" the hooky parts sound as artificially treated as any vocal trick from T-Pain. In places, so much air and echo whooshes around Carey's voice, she seems to hiss.

Isn't this how producers treat stars who can't sing?

Then again, non-singers regularly score big singles these days. So perhaps it was a savvy move for Carey to mimic their style.

Certainly, it's a cynical move, if hardly a new one for the singer. Carey's last CD, "E=MC2" also applied a heavy layer of gauze to her voice, though a less gloppy one than this time. Likewise, her last CD pushed her further into hip-hop's most melodically spare palette. The more years that pass following Carey's time with Tommy Motolla, the more she shuns her broad and tuneful ballads in favor of something melodically bare and rhythmically slovenly.

This time, Carey takes that m.o. to the extreme. Like some female equivalent to R.Kelly, most of the new songs feature no more than 3 notes a piece, repeated in a sing-songy drone. As sheer craft, it's so depressing, even something like Foreigner's "I Want To Know What Love Is" (which Carey covers at the CD's close) sounds like The Beatles by comparison.

To camouflage the bare tunes, Carey over-indulges her most mocked features: those rococo melismas and that shrieking tea-kettle whistle. One track, "Angel (The Prelude)" consists of nothing but the latter.

The instrumentation proves just as eagerly artificial. If there's a non-synthezed instrument here, it's keeping itself well hidden. Carey even carries over the impersonal nature of the CD to her lyrics. Despite the "Memoir" moniker, there isn't a single telling disclosure. Or so we have reason to presume. Though this is her first CD since she married Nick Cannon, only two tracks treat love as anything but an act of betrayal or a spur to longing.

The result may mean to mirror the youthful frustrations of hip-hop-inflected R&B but it's an antique version of it. R&B stars like Beyonce and Keisha Cole have lately progressed into something far more sophisticated than this. Coupled with the nervous over-correction of her voice, the result makes Carey seem like the proverbial aging actress who's trying so hard to cover her perceived flaws, all she does is call more attention to them.