*** Keith Sweat

TWISTED

(Elektra)

Sweat has long since eased his lover's stance as a singer from the purely raw and physical to preliminaries, relaxed and tentative. His mellow tenor, a dependably easygoing presence, fits the quiet-night-at-home tempos of most of Twisted's songs like an old pair of bedroom slippers, and the lyrics do not tell a lie: from "Funky Dope Lovin' " and "Yumi" to "Show Me the Way," "Chocolate Girl," and the title song, he sings the beginning of a love affair, not its consummation. Emblematic of his back-to-the-beginning approach to love is "Nobody," a duet with Athena Cage, in which her soprano smoothness and his sidelong whole notes adore each other's romantic specialness without trying to prove it by doing the freak. Emblematic, too, is "Come with Me," in which Sweat stands aside to let Ronnie Isley -- soul singing's new old mentor, suddenly -- paint the song's ceiling a bright shade of falsetto. The bad old hip-hop side of Sweat seems gone for good from songs so clean they glisten.

-- Michael Freedberg