It's been nearly 20 years since the vocal powerhouse and musical icon made famous for belting out "It's Raining Men" to generations of adoring gay men has released a solo album. Thankfully, that hellacious hiatus has finally come to an end and Martha Wash has released her second solo album, entitled Something Good.
Martha's career has long been defined by dance music. She started out as a backup singer for disco legend Sylvester and then paired up with fellow backup singer Izora Rhodes to form The Weather Girls. Martha was the true voice behind Black Box in the late 1980s and was a featured vocalist for C+C Music Factory in the '90s. With that type of history, it would have been all too easy for Wash to produce another dance album, yet, quite courageously, Martha's latest album breaks new ground as an uplifting adult-contemporary compilation.
Early reactions and reviews have been good. RuPaul, star of the popular RuPaul's Drag Race series and also a longtime Marth Wash fan, posted several tweets in praise of the new album and its shift to a new genre, saying, "She switched it up & Im really diggin it!" One of the more surprising shifts on Something Good is Martha's soulful rendition of the Aerosmith classic "Dream On," but the soaring vocals on "Proud" and "It's My Time" are equally impressive, if not more so. And devotees of the dance floor need not worry: The album's title track, "Something Good," is quite a toe tapper (and I would not be surprised to hear a dance remix in the near future). With only eight songs, the album may not have all the usual gimmicks, bells or whistles, but don't let Martha undersell it. Something Good is really something wonderful.