Face Up

So Ms. Stansfield makes a return to the soul-pop parade after an absence of almost four years and the result is, pretty much what you’d expect, really.

Face Up is high on the shiny, happy, slickly produced fare that is all the rage recently, and, in fairness to her, Lisa Stansfield has more right than most to cash in on the genre’s current popularity: after all, she has been doing this sort of thing for years.

Tracks like the opening ‘I’ve Got Something Better’ and ‘Candy’ are super-smooth, uptempo r’n’b-influenced shakers. Lisa also has the tonsils to belt out the odd ballad du jour, like ‘How Could You?’, ‘When The Last Sun Goes Down’ or the string-drenched monster-hit-in-waiting, ‘Didn’t I’.

My main problem with Face Up, however, is that it is far too stylised to be called soul music. To these ears, true soul is played by musicians who actually feel what the song is about: deep-fried, if you like, as opposed to lightly dipped in computer-generated grease and polish.

While tracks like ‘Let’s Just Call It Love’ and the title track itself are decent pop songs in their own right, there is far too much gloss and not enough emotion.

For my own part, I would love to hear the admittedly talented Ms Stansfield fronting a really hot soul outfit, not in a glamorous modern jazz bar, but in a smoky basement where the swags and tails are replaced by slags and failures. Then, perhaps, she could dig deep and produce songs of the calibre of the vocalists of yore whom she so obviously admires.