Album: Melanie C

Reason, Virgin

Having laid down a few markers for her future career direction with her debut, Northern Star, it's strange to find Mel C reneging on all those good intentions with an album as half-hearted and uncertain as Reason, which dashes around from one style to another, trying on R&B, rock, cod-reggae and disco with little conviction or style. Though she has again co-written most of the material, it's not exactly what you'd call torn from her heart, none of the songs sounding as if it just had to be sung. It's as if Mel and her people were so busy keeping a weather eye open for significant changes in the pop climate that they neglected to establish a decisive style of her own. The single "Here it Comes Again" is typical of the general characterlessness: it plods along, neither rock nor pop, soul nor dance, ballad nor rocker, ultimately falling between not just two but an entire range of stools, its mild grunge chording hardly helping bolster the "serious rock chick" aspirations she once held. Nor, come to that, do "Reason" and "Lose Myself in You", as pallid a pair of by-the-numbers R&B also-rans as you'll hear all year. Her choice of collaborators gives some clues to the project's generally bland aspect, including as it does such benchmarks of mediocrity as the former Blow Monkey Dr Robert and the New Radicals' one-trick pony Gregg Alexander:his one trick being the formulaic "positive" attitudinising of "On the Horizon". The most successful piece is "Soul Boy", written by The Blue Nile's Paul Buchanan: an aching ballad built on an organ drone, it approaches the fetishised emotional turmoil of Hall & Oates's classic "She's Gone", but without the catharsis.