Hot

With her delightfully husky, conspiratorial growl – dripping with mischief, sassy Northern soul and a believeable, unforced warmth – and her loose’n’lanky Amazonian presence, Melanie B was always the Girl most likely to remain interesting when outside the glow and girl-power-in-numbers of the Spice unit. And following the angular, spacey hip-hop-nouveau of the Missy Elliott collaboration ‘I Want You Back’ and the monolithic neo-funk of ‘Word Up’‚ the first solo album from the Frightening One looked like being as full of musical surprises as the other Girls’ non-Spice endeavours were of image changes, weight and collaborator fluctuations and photo opportunities.

Disappointingly, then, Hot is the sound of huge pop potential taking the safe road. Safe, as in inoffensive Spicey outtakes from three years ago (‘Lullaby’‚ ‘Feels So Good’); and safe, as in rather too many second-division MTV’n’b finger-wagglers of the y’ain’t-never-gonna-get-it variety (there is, cringingly, a track called ‘Pack Your Shit’‚ punctuated with huffily slamming doors).

Mind you, we do get the stiletto swingbeat of current single ‘Tell Me’ and the spooky, garagey jitter of ‘Step Inside’, as well as the plastic-fantastic ‘I Want You Back’ that raised our hopes in the first place. So: not too scary, then. But not half Scary enough.