Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license.
Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat.
We can research this topic together.
...If I Ever Fall in Love is the debut album of American R&B group Shai, released December 22, 1992, on MCA Records. It was produced by group members Carl "Groove" Martin and Darnell Van Rensalier.
Rolling Stone gave the album three-and-a-half out of five stars and complimented its "crisp, precise harmonies that imply explosive vocal power but display few pyrotechnics", adding that "Shai joins the spiritual yearnings of Take Six with the secular pull of Boyz II Men". David Browne of Entertainment Weekly found its hip hop and new jack swing-oriented songs "fussy unconvincing", but praised the group's crooning and stated, "They wrap their voices like a thick shag carpet around the choruses of the album's languorous, starry-eyed ballads".
However, in his consumer guide for The Village Voice, critic Robert Christgau gave the album a B− rating and named it "dud of the month", indicating "a bad record whose details rarely merit further thought". Christgau found the group's singing "indifferent" and panned them as having "no class and no sense of humor; they're too smarmy and too slow", adding that "They epitomize the difference between seduction and betrayal--between shared lie and imposed illusion, rascal and bounder, rogue and complete asshole. There's not a winning wink on the entire album". In a retrospective review, AllMusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine stated, "Apart from the gorgeous title track, most of the material on ...If I Ever Fall in Love is underdeveloped; although Shai sound terrific, their material doesn't match their vocal talents."
