First, let’s put things in perspective. It’s a chilly February morning in the New York City underground and Jessica Cornish is belting out the title track from her as-yet-unreleased debut album Who You Are. 40 of the least fazable people on the planet have stalled to hear the voice Adele dubbed “illegal”, backed only by the sounds of a crummy CD player perched on top of a phone box.
It’s easy to see why pop prince Justin Timberlake called Jessie J “the best singer in the world right now” – the 22-year-old Londoner has truly outstanding pipes. If cramming 14 notes into a single lyric is a craft, this girl can stand alongside GaGa, Christina and Beyonce in any gratuitous Grammy tribute you can think of and still not break a sweat.
But back to the Times Square busking session, which you can and should view online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_pnFhFjNtY. For all the poised iPhones and dropped jaws in the clip, I can’t shake the feeling that nobody would have bothered to listen had the Londoner’s debut album been pumping out of that little red boombox.
Who You Are is not a terrible record, but it’s certainly not worth stopping in your tracks for. Over 50 bewildering minutes, our shiny-haired diva flits between sounding desperately current (‘Rainbow’) and hopelessly dated (‘Casualty Of Love’), while her staggering vocals get overtaken by a mess of predictable beats. The songs themselves do little to help matters; most tunes are based around less-than groundbreaking mantras like ‘Follow your destiny!’, ‘Stand up for what you believe in!’ and well… you know the rest.
Alas, the lyrics grow even staler when our feisty MC turns her attention to the subjects of poverty (“We’re the colours of the rainbow/Let’s share our pot of gold”) and relationships (“I said I’d never write a song about love/ but when it feels this good, a song fits like a glove”).
When Jessie J’s other talents include rhyming ‘ch-ching, ch-ching’ with ‘ba-bling, ba-bling’ and reaching Ke$ha levels of inanity, it’s obvious that her cracking voice should be pushed centre stage. Alas, this only really happens once, on the soulful acoustic ballad ‘Big White Room’, the sole number to have been recorded live. Agitated, empowered and brimming with personality, here, Miss J is nothing short of astounding.
Elsewhere however, this wild child’s identity is still at large. ‘Mamma Knows Best’ is textbook big band-phase Aguilera, complete with breakneck scatting, while ‘Abradababra’ is the blissed-out lovechoon Katy Perry would have killed for. The gutsy ‘Who’s Laughing Now’ features the closest thing to a signature sound, along with pimpcentric first single ‘Do It Like A Dude’, but it’ll take a whole album of these bombastic pop nuggets before JJ can usurp freak queen Rihanna.
And it’s a shame, really. It’s not Jessica Cornish’s fault that the contemporary music-lover’s attention span is increasingly comparable to that of a small mammal, or that 12-year-olds need bigger and bigger beats with which to irritate their elders on the bus. Neither is it fair that every reviewer from here to L.A. (this one included) will drag up the same half a dozen names in describing the Jessie J sound.
The bottom line? After wading through the R’n’B dolly-mix of Who You Are, I haven’t a bejaysus-ing clue who Jessie J is, beyond a shiny-haired minx with a phenomenal voice. There’s absolutely nothing to stop her from winning Best Pop Vocal Album at the Grammy’s next year, but we can only hope that next time around, she’ll bring something fresher, louder and more defined.