Heartache and pain are to Mary J. Blige as nine bullets are to 50 Cent: badges of authenticity turned persona-making scars. But 14 years and three Grammys after her debut, she’s like a rapper who hasn’t seen the block in ages: Married for two years, she’s living domestic bliss, not singlehood’s struggle. So for her seventh album, Her Highness had two options. She could take the aged-rapper road and keep singing about the hard-knock life—in the past tense. This was her approach on 2001’s triple-platinum No More Drama—which marked her transition from long-suffering Mary to former-long-suffering Mary—and she dabbles in it here, too: “Good Woman Down” is a surprisingly catchy self-help song about the times she “went to the edge of the ledge but I didn’t jump.”

The other option is to—gasp!—make happy music, which she does on an album brimming with love songs. The plan to reinvigorate a persona verging on one-dimensional hits has one snag, though: her voice. For all its emotional intensity, there isn’t much variety; it can perform ache but not exuberance, anguish but not crazy-in-love ecstasy. So when, on the lusciously layered ballad “No One Will Do,” Blige croons “I don’t want no one but you,” it sounds like a moan, not an avowal. And when she declares, on the bouncy confessional “Baggage,” “nobody had ever treated me this way,” she seems wounded, not enraptured. Her ardent love songs ultimately come off not as love songs but standard ache-and-pain Mary tracks—making this album not quite the breakthrough it might have been.

Two stellar tracks, throwbacks to ’60s-era Aretha Franklin ballads, are exceptions to that rule. On “Be Without You,” with its gentle, piano-driven melody, and “I Found My Everything,” a gospel-flavored love song featuring R&B smoothie Raphael Saadiq, her voice sounds subdued: softer, sweeter, peaceful enough to persuade us, finally, that she’s really feeling the warm-and-fuzzy sentiments in the songs.

DOWNLOAD: “No One Will Do,” “Be Without You,” “I Found My Everything”