Album reviews: Fleur East – Fearless, and Kelsea Ballerini – Kelsea

The ‘X Factor’ runner-up Fleur East tries on a number of different guises on her overly familiar second album, while Kelsea Ballerini proves on her third go-around that she has finally found her voice

‘X Factor’ runner-up Fleur East, who has returned with her second album

Fleur East – Fearless

★★☆☆☆

Four years on from her debut album Love, Sax and Flashbacks, former X Factor runner-up Fleur East returns with Fearless. She’s ditched the sax, which is possibly fearless enough as it is, and moved on from her earlier funky-pop stylings. Now she is doing what is to be expected of a young pop star in the streaming age and that is: trying out a host of new sounds to see what sticks. Or, rather, see what will be clicked on.

Lead single “Favourite Thing” leans on the dance-pop East familiarised herself with on her first record, but chant-like verses distract from more than complement the song’s rhythm. Meanwhile, another single, “Lucky”, veers dangerously close to pat EDM. The tone then switches abruptly to the heavily Latin-influenced “There She Go”, all horns and overbearing choruses, on a song about a woman that potential lovers would be ill-advised to pursue.

A number of tracks exhibit other familiar hallmarks of the zeitgeist, and sometimes it works. Both “On and On” and “No Boy No Cry” successfully borrow from the Afrobeats and trap-influenced chart sound popularised by many of the UK’s biggest artists right now, to dazzling effect. In most places, though, the album is jumbled. What starts as an explosion of excitement with the track “Easy To Love”, a thumping non-apology to lovers past, driven by kicking drums and a snappy piano riff, quickly settles into a generic, dance-infused pop sound. It feels familiar – but hardly fearless. Jake Cudsi

Kelsea Ballerini – Kelsea

★★★★☆

In the past, Kelsea Ballerini has struggled to reconcile her natural leaning towards pop with her position in Nashville’s country music scene. Her last record, 2017’s Unapologetically, was packed with nostalgic-hued empowerment tracks such as “Legends”, but the defiant guitar twangs heard on the stomper “Miss Me More” were few and far between.

On her third album, the self-titled Kelsea, she finds a balance between the two. There’s more than a hint of early Taylor Swift on perky opener “Overshare”, while “Club” is as uplifting a “not going out” song as you could hope for.

Ballerini’s collaboration with Halsey, “The Other Girl”, has something of a JoJo kiss-off about it (as does “The Way I Used To”), although here, Ballerini takes rather vicious aim at the woman in a love triangle. The predictable Ed Sheeran co-write, “Love and Hate”, is one of his dreariest offerings on another artist’s album in some time; “Bragger” is better, recalling Shania Twain of 2002’s Up! era, or Delta Goodrem.

The record sags in places, due to one or two songs too many (she could have ditched “Hole in the Bottle” instead of adding to the army of country jaunts about substance abuse). Overall, though, Kelsea is a slickly produced and well-crafted collection of songs that asserts Ballerini as a new queen of country-pop. Roisin O’Connor