Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 26/10/09
Label: Polydor

L'Oreal model and popular WAG Cheryl Cole has only gone and made an album. Of course, she's also one fifth of the most consistently virulent and credible UK pop band of the decade, but then that's little more than incidental detail. As a group, Girls Aloud have been an effective conduit for fearless production team Xenomania's skewed songwriting genius, but they were never designed to function as unsupported solo units. Even in that context, Cole is far from the likeliest candidate; gossip page regular Sarah Harding or even quirky band mis-shape Nicola Roberts seem more naturally predisposed to solo remoulding.

What is more to the point though is that she now has a celebrity - owed in part to aforementioned factors but primarily to her judging residence on the "X Factor" - that begs to be exploited. With a now established juggernaut brand and the largest audience on British television behind her she'd be barking not to. But then considering how easy it should have been to put out a set of textbook tunes, bullet-proof (or even shower-proof) to the kind of criticisms dispensed each week from the judging desk, whilst building on her brassy, metropolitan 21st century girl-next-door image, some of the decisions taken for her debut solo album are spectacularly wrong-headed.

Her performance of brisk, enjoyable lead single "Fight For This Love" on the TV programme was over-described by a gormless, wide-eyed Simon Cowell as "incredible" in his ongoing bid to drive down the nation's expectations. In reality an excessive production overwhelmed her and she wasn't aided by an anaemic Bambi vocal that buckled at its knees - an impression that weakly straddles this whole album. Over 11 tracks she fails to pull in a single noteworthy vocal, that's if you can even locate it beneath the waves of effects designed to disguise how very little is actually there.

The slick, anodised R&B wallpaper that forms the album's base feels like an ill-fit throughout, both culturally and because she asserts no authority over it. Will.i.am of Black Eyed Peas is also, somewhat inexplicably, all over the album, producing and rapping. His 2008 single "Heartbreaker", on which Cheryl cameoed, is included and "Heaven" feels no more like her own song - the Sunderland girl pouting and parroting back the "my heaven's witchoo" refrain like a hired mannequin only serves to assert how little of her own voice made it on here. When she should be striking out alone, she ends up all too often seeming like a guest on her own album.

    by James Berry