and recording contract. Critical reception All for You received generally positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 73. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic favored All for You over her last studio album, The Velvet Rope, calling it "alluring, easily enveloping the listener." Erlewine added, "This is her sexiest-sounding record, thanks to Jam and Lewis' silky groove and her breathy delivery, two things that make the record palatable." Tom Sinclair of Entertainment Weekly gave the album a 'B' rating, saying, "Despite a few missteps, All for You is about as good as modern diva-pop gets, with a higher ratio of worthy-to-mediocre songs than might be expected... it adds up to a lot more than most female singers have done for us lately." Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone gave the album three-and-a-half out of five stars, declaring it "just as fresh, familiar and appealing as you've come to expect from Jackson, and that's no small achievement." Gene Stout of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer called All for You "one of the best of her career," while John Mulvey of Yahoo! Music UK referred to it as "her most unnerving and plausible character thus far." Mulvey added, "This is a much more satisfying album than The Velvet Rope, even if most of the songs are overlong and a few juggle satin sheet-cliches with self-help ones to numbing effect. Nevertheless, All for You stands as a monument to the positive effects of divorce." Rating it three out of four stars, Steve Jones of USA Today commented. "the singer is in a sexy, fun-loving mood […] While she overdoes the between-song interludes here, she never fails to get you to move. When it comes to burning up a dance floor, she is still Ms. Jackson." Jon Pareles of The New York Times stated, "Ms. Jackson luxuriates in textures as dizzying as a new infatuation," commended the album as containing "songs so baroquely sumptuous that they're virtually experimental." Pareles added, "Boudoir ballads undulate in torrid slow motion while Ms. Jackson moans like a phone-sex operator, and uptempo tunes hark back to disco, splice mock-operetta to hard rock or, in Better Days, conjure an easy-listening 1960's-pop apotheosis." Her vocals were also praised, saying "Countless overdubs of Ms. Jackson's voice turn her into an airborne choir; computer rhythms thump and