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RECORDINGS Quick Spins
Modest Mouse, with Isaac Brock (right) and now featuring former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, has a potential hit on its hands with "We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank."
(By Kevin Winter -- Getty Images)
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With English bad girls Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse currently jockeying for America's attention, what's a nice girl like Joss Stone to do? The 19-year-old Brit has an enormous voice and a history of making records that show it off but don't do much else. Her third full-length, "Introducing Joss Stone" (a title that pointedly seems to disown her first release), offers more of the same: It's a conveyor belt of mid-tempo R&B tracks, each of them perfectly pleasant and indistinguishable from the next.
Stone is a voice in search of a personality, and a definitive sound to contain it. "Introducing" simulates a vintage African American soul album down to its last detail. It's all there: the organs, the strings, the old-school call-and-response backing vocals, the circa-"Everyday People" vibe.
Most of all, she and producer Raphael Saadiq seem to want badly to evoke Lauryn Hill, whose indelible hit "Doo Wop (That Thing)" remains the Rosetta stone of retro-girly, take-them-to-school R&B. Hill even emerges from her undisclosed location to provide backing vocals on the otherwise unremarkable "Music."
Stone is no more guilty of cultural misappropriation than, say, Christina Aguilera; she's just better at it. Songs such as "Tell Me 'Bout It" and "Girl, They Won't Believe It" are giddy and appealing and as authentic as karaoke -- tough to dislike, even tougher to take seriously.
DOWNLOAD THESE: "Tell Me 'Bout It," "Girl, They Won't Believe It"
-- Allison Stewart
