Carrying on with sassy celebration

TLC

“3D”

(Arista)

***

Rather than dwelling on the untimely loss of Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, Rozanda “Chilli” Thomas and Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins use this album to celebrate their late partner while adding to the group’s sassy, thought-provoking and innovative legacy.

Lopes worked on about half these tunes, and her rapping is key to such taunting numbers as “Girl Talk” and the lover-man-skewering “Quickie.” “3D” suffers slightly from the inevitable lack of TLC’s usual freewheeling unity. But in a genre where big-name producers are often more distinctive than the artists themselves, the group again manages to employ such heavies as the Neptunes, Rodney Jerkins, Babyface and Raphael Saadiq without losing its own identity.

Thomas and Watkins must have found it hard to finish without Lopes, but they still push their blend of R&B;, soul, hip-hop and rock forward. The squishy funk of “Dirty” offers a “moment of silence” for Left Eye. But the acoustic-flavored “Turntable” speaks more eloquently, albeit indirectly, to Lopes’ absence as Chilli and T-Boz wistfully reflect on life’s unexpected changes.

-- Natalie Nichols

*

Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent). The albums are already released unless otherwise noted.