** MARIAH CAREY Butterfly Columbia, $17.98 he good news about Mariah - -My Carey's Eyes." seventh With its release solid is melody, "Close strong vocal performance, nicely restrained arrangement and personal though guarded lyrics, it's one of the best things Carey has recorded. The bad news is the album has 11 other songs. Not that "Butterfly," in stores Tuesday, is awful. It's just another Mariah Carey album, a standard-issue diva showcase that takes her voice - a wondrous, multi-octave vocal instrument - and allows it to languish in cookie-cutter songs that champion synthesizers over soul. Like the rest of Carey's albums, "Butterfly" is oblique, but even more maddeningly so now that Carey is her own principal lyricist. These songs - most of them riddled with cliches about loving you, missing you, needing you and how good it feels inside - could be about anybody. In "Close My Eyes," Carey makes allusions to learning "many things little ones shouldn't know" and growing up "a little too soon," but she never elaborates. Only in the album "Outside" does "Stand- she seem to cut deeper, singing ing alone/ Eager to just believe it's good enough to be/ What you really are/ But in your heart/ Uncertainty forever lies.' Isn't this a woman who's in the midst of a divorce (from her label's chief, Tommy Mottola)? Isn't this Carey's opportunity to bare a little more of her soul than we've seen before? At 27, isn't she tiring of choruses about looking for "another taste of honey"? Apparently not. "Butterfly" doesn't explore much new musical territory, either. On the bulk of the songs, Carey and her main producer, Walter Afanasieff, build lush, slow-tempo backings for cloyingly torchy material such as "Fourth of July," "Whenever You Call" and "Butterfly," which is reprised in a disco mix later in the album. Hip-hop mogul Sean "Puffy" Combs is disappointing on his two songs, the meandering lead off track "Honey" and the messy, wordy swirl of "Breakdown." "Babydoll" is a disturbingly passive study in dependence and submission, and Carey - who covered Journey's "Open Arms" on her previous album proves again she's a poor judge of other people's songs, slogging with Dru Hill through a nearly sevenminute version of Prince's "The Beautiful Ones.' "Butterfly" is easy enough on the ears that it will probably continue Carey's multiplatinum sales streak and add some more Grammy nominations to her resume, and maybe CAREY I - she'll even win some this time. But Carey should be able to do much better than this. -Gary Graff A Satisfying Stew From Babyface **** VARIOUS ARTISTS Soul Food LaFace, $16.98 - n er, jor the motion superstar soundtrack picture record to as his a first producer produc- maKenneth "Babyface" Edmonds largely sticks to the glossy ballads that have given him hits with Eric Clapton, Boyz I1 Men and Toni Braxton. The movie "Soul Food," set to hit screens September 26, marks Babyface as a player in Hollywood. Coproduced with his wife, Tracey, for 20th Century Fox and Edmonds Entertainment, the film stars Vanessa Williams, who does not sing on the soundtrack album. But Babyface did corral some of the brightest youthfor the CD, in stores Tuesday, inoriented acts in the R&B business cluding Boyz II Men, Blackstreet, and Puffy and Lil' Kim. Babyface wrote and produced seven of the album's 13 tracks. He gives a typically polished blend of acoustic and electric guitar, churchy piano, programmed drums and synthesized strings to performances by Boyz 11 Men, Milestone (a vocal quintet comprising Kevon and Melvin from After 7, K-Ci and JoJo from Jodeci, and Babyface), Dru Hill, Usher Raymond and Monica, and Bay Area artists Tony Toni Toné and En Vogue. "Boys and Girls" finds Tony Toni Toné returning to the
