Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 06/06/05
Label: Virgi

Geri Halliwell is a joke. We all know it. She knows it. Sometimes the joke is on us; how this mouthy goodtime girl talked her way into the most successful pop group of recent times then - by being the loudest, the brashest, the ginger-est - tricked us into giving her the attention that would make her a monster (like feeding a Mogwai after midnight). Sometimes the joke is on her as another fly-on-the-wall documentary exposes more emotional outbursts, malapropisms and dyspraxic calamity. We've all had a good laugh.

The solo records were awful. Sometimes they were awful in an oversized, camp, audacious mess - the kind of way some people like. Sometimes they were just awful in a lyrics-by-magnetic-poetry, vocals by bronchial sea-lion sort of way. And when Geri failed she always came up with a new way to make us look in her direction again. Lurching between success and failure and often a mixture of both, the career of Geri Halliwell if plotted on a graph would look like a new ride at Alton Towers (it would even have some vomit on it).

So we come to Geri Halliwell's third album "Passion" (though predictably none is evident). It would be tempting to call this her farewell album though we all know you can't keep a Spice Girl down for long. Opening track "Desire" features some typically cringe-making references to pussy (Geri is Mrs Slocombe - the disco years). The title song sees her prodding at the corpse of Monroe with a pseudo-sexy 50s croon. There's nothing Geri likes more than pastiche. "There's Always Tomorrow" mines the lounge/bossa nova groove as if the last film she saw was Austin Powers and she has another stab at a bigband number with "So I Give Up On Love".

It should come as no surprise but she really can't sing. It was always a received opinion that the Spice Girls couldn't sing; they actually all could, except Geri. She seems worse now she's had lessons, restrained and weak; the Halliwell honk now a shadow of its former self. "Passion" is destined for the bargain bin before the year is out. Obsessive fans (does Geri have any other kind anymore?) will, doubtless, maintain it was criminally underrated. And it isn't a terrible album, just a pointless one; devoid of anything that once made Geri a colourful distraction and missing the Girl Power, self-help mumbo jumbo and characteristic lyrical gibberish of previous releases. "Passion" isn't silly enough, camp enough or mad enough to matter.

Please let this be the end. Let the upcoming Spice reunion close the chapter marked "Geri tries her hand at music". For some it may have been hilarious that someone with so little talent could go such a long way but that joke isn't funny anymore.

    by Tom Townsend