While her old comrades in All Saints have spent the past three years oscillating between tabloid spats and unsuccessful singing careers, Shaznay Lewis has predictably kept a lower profile. At the height of All Saints' considerable fame, Lewis was celebrated, a little patronisingly, as The Talented One, thanks to her co-writing credits on "Never Ever" and "Pure Shores" and her knack for staying out of trouble.
She was not, however, the group's strongest singer, a fact thrown into relief by this carefully-constructed, cunningly-marketed and ultimately rather bland solo album. "Open" capitalises on All Saints' reputation as the most musically sophisticated pop group of their generation, and the three years that have elapsed since their split. Shaznay's fans are older now, it assumes, and perhaps fractionally more self-conscious about how fashionable they are.
As a result, "Open" sounds like a Beverley Knight album for aspiring Notting Hill residents. Essentially, it's one of those British pop R&B records that tries to combine contemporary digital textures with the nominal warmth of vintage reggae and soul. And, as usual, it doesn't quite work. For all the vinyl crackle and Jamaican horns, the contributions from Biz Markie, Primal Scream and Basement Jaxx, the occasional Kanye West-style sped-up vocal, "Open" is a frustratingly ordinary record.
Part of the problem is Shaznay's voice. In All Saints' deceptively haphazard harmonies, it sounded fine enough. But exposed and electronically tweaked here, it's a fairly featureless tool, without much range or guts or, critically, emotional resonance. Not that many of these songs demand much in the way of heartrending gymnastics.
Often, she sounds like she's half-heartedly assuming a series of postures, from stroppy (Basement Jaxx's disappointing skank, "Mr Dawg") to soppy (the dreary first single, "Never Felt Like This Before"). At her most engaged, on "Don't Know What To Say", she gets tellingly animated about the pain of writer's block. Her strongest tune, the All Saints-ish "Mr Weatherman", draws feeble parallels between feeling sad and the British climate.
"Open" is far from an awful debut. The hygienised good taste is not too oppressive, and a stretch of songs in the second half ("Mr Weatherman", "Butterflies", "Nasty Boy") suggest that if she'd grafted even longer, she might have done her reputation more justice. As it is, Shaznay's time away might have disassociated her from her crass old bandmates, but it also allowed Jamelia to steal her position in the charts. How uncharacteristically indisciplined of her.
