CD Review: Katie Melua

Fledgling chart star Katie Melua is a self-possessed young woman, plummy of tone, but steely of intent. However, look closely, you can see the strings. The instant success of her debut album, Call Off the Search, is the result of a cynical strategy to launch the UK's answer to the current queen of easy listening, Norah Jones.

Unlike Jones, whose success was unforeseen and whose sleepy music at least sounds organic, every Melua move is calculated to elicit sales.

Her opening gambit - a simple tune with rudimentary lyrics, plucked out on an acoustic guitar - generated the polite applause it merited. There was clarity and a hint of soul in her girlish voice, but no finesse in her delivery and no charm in her public schoolgirl stage presence and banal chat.

Her numerous cover versions, including a smug take on the Cure's Love Cats and Canned Heat's On the Road Again, were somewhat confounding. In at least one case - her horrible hotel band version of I Put a Spell on You - she was completely out of her depth.

New "political" song Spider's Web, with its hopelessly gauche ebony-and-ivory sentiments, exposed her as the glorified sixth- former in adult's clothing that she is. Jack's Room was far more likeable, but not enough to compensate for the rest of the prematurely aged set, throughout which - to paraphrase her lyric on The Closest Thing To Crazy - Melua was feeling 22, acting 43.