Another week, another Brit soul-belter? The debut album from Rox feels so familiar you may experience flashbacks to your last dinner party whilst listening to it. The smoky vocals sound as if they were lifted straight from Duffy’s record; a gentle background fug of mannered soul evokes memory of Corinne Bailey Rae and, well, every coffee-table chanteuse to have rolled off the production line since Amy Winehouse hit the bullseye.
That’s a shame because you get the feeling that Roxanne Tataei – a Croydon-raised 21 year old of Iranian/Jamaican extraction – would have a lot more to say, if only she weren’t hamstrung by someone’s designs on a place on the BBC Radio 2 playlist. There are flashes of genuine personality – the cookie cutter soul-jazz of ‘I Don’t Believe’ (co-penned by ‘New York State of Mind’ writer Al Shux) is lifted out of steerage class by Rox’s good girl gone bad snarl; and stripped down show-stopper ‘Sad Eyes’ reminds us that, as ever, less is often more. Mostly, though, Memoirs is immediately forgettable.