There are break-up albums and then there are break-up albums. This Is What The Truth Feels Like is a scorched earth affair, with former No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani pouring obsessively over the disintegration of her marriage to Bush’s Gavin Rossdale (hint: it was the Nanny wot done it). Yet far from raising the authenticity bar, the messy subject matter has apparently given Stefani license to embrace cliche after cliche.
She’s been betrayed but she’s strong, her heart is broken but, hey, tomorrow’s another day (she is currently seeing Blake Shelton, a fellow judge on the US edition of The Voice). The assembled tag team of writers – Stargate and Greg Kurstin among them – strain to craft a pop juggernaut yet they too are fatally reliant on stereotype.
There are “banging” anthems (‘Make Me Like You’), faux-reggae excursions (‘Send Me A Picture’) and weedy electro stompers (‘Rare’). Amid the contortions, Stefani sometimes feels like a passenger on her own record, her pointed vocal style often at odds with the lush production. She may have gone through personal hell over the pasts several years – but that’s no reason to usher her fans into pop purgatory, which is kinda what she does here. 
_ Ed Power // Out Now