Joss Stone: ‘awash with various stripes of retro-soul and rubbery vocal histrionics’.
Joss Stone's fifth album arrives on an unusual wave of sympathy for the 24-year-old Devonian singer. Last month, police arrested two menarmed with a sword and a body bag on suspicion of wanting to rob the fifth richest pop star under 30 in the UK and Ireland.
It provided a notable interruption to Stone's current round of hobnobbing, which has included an invitation to the royal wedding. Stone has also recently shared studio time with rock royalty Mick Jagger, reggae singer Damian Marley, Bollywood soundtrack powerhouse AR Rahman and former Eurythmic Dave Stewart, the convenor of SuperHeavy, an outfit whose album is due in September. It's a disparate group, in which the hippyish soulsinger is very much the junior partner. Until then, we have Stone's own album, recorded with producer Stewart.
It is called LP1, implying a new debut – much as her third album was called Introducing Joss Stone. The teenage Stone originally came to prominence with 2003's Soul Sessions, a classy record made with Miami soul veteran Betty Wright that established Britain as some sort of unlikely spawning ground for highly exportable white female soul singers.
Since her heyday, Stone's efforts have been leapfrogged first by Amy Winehouse, then Leona Lewis, and latterly Adele. Stone even covered Candi Staton's "You Got the Love" before, and considerably less successfully than, Florence and the Machine. Stone's wobbly place in the nation's bosom was undone, though, by her mid-Atlantic rambling at the 2007 Brit Awards, an event from which her UK album sales have yet to recover.
Pointedly, LP1 features Stone's lips and her pierced nose on the cover. Released independently, LP1 is a co-production between her own label, Stone'd Records and Stewart's Surfdog concern. You would imagine that Stone might want to bring the fight back to her usurpers, or, having parted company from her former label, EMI, after depicting herself in a cage for the cover of her 2009 album, Colour Me Free!, that she might at least want to make an authoritative statement that albums product-managed by musicians might be more interesting than those contrived by label execs. Certainly, Stone can now draw on a decade's worth of Los Angelean life lessons, and a deep vein of eccentricity. A week of recording sessions in Nashville might have yielded something startling.
Instead, LP1 is another Joss Stone album, awash with various stripes of retro-soul and rubbery vocal histrionics. It's defiant, but only in that Stone calls a man a bitch on "Karma", a funk track that recalls Lenny Kravitz. It's slightly bonkers, but not in the way you'd hope. "Landlord" concerns a tryst that begins when the guy downstairs fixes the hole in Joss's roof.
Stewart has a guiding hand and, to his credit, the Nashville musicians bring subtle instrumentation, twinkly pianos and peach-sweet backing vocals, fostering an un-bombastic feel. The album's becalmed middle section is its most pleasing passage. Stone turns her cyclone of a voice down to a broken croon on the low-key "Drive All Night", achieving an intimacy she lacks elsewhere.
In the main, though, Stone whoops, growls and "mm-hmms" without really imposing an authorial presence. As reintroductions go, then, it's not exactly memorable.
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