** Mariah Carey

#1's

(Columbia)

"This is not a greatest-hits album! It's too soon. I haven't been recording long enough for that!" writes Mariah Carey in the liner notes, though #1's certainly walks and quacks like a duck. Rather, she says, this is a "thank you" to the fans who have given her an astounding string of 13 #1 hits, all present here. Which means those fans will already own all but the three new tracks on this CD: "When You Believe" (the duet/duel with Whitney Houston) and two unmemorable examples of Carey's patented dreamlover/fantasy/hero reveries.

The tracks are actually presented in reverse chronological order, so that, starting with grandiose, mildly hip-hop-inflected showstoppers whose dense arrangements frequently upstage Carey's chirping, they seem to devolve toward comparatively spartan and pure showcases for her honeyed lower register -- though spartan isn't really the right word for someone who never sings one or two syllables when she can hover melismatically around seven or eight. As a career retrospective, #1's shows Carey, like Houston, to be a singer with an astonishing gift muted by risk-averse songwriting, gloppy production, and the singer's own showboating as a substitute for genuine expression of soul.

-- Gary Susman