Who You Are
is a singularly ironic title for a debut that finds
Jessie J
trying on discarded threads from every British pop starlet of the last half decade. She's cheekily profane like
Lily Allen
, she rides old-school R&B grooves like
Amy Winehouse
and
Duffy
, she's bratty like
Kate Nash
, she can be as icily brittle as
Leona Lewis
, she touches upon the sullen confessionals of
Adele
, and -- most of all -- she belts out her tunes with a full-throttle roar that recalls the brassy ballast of
Natasha Bedingfield
. The latter is telling because it reveals precisely how entrenched
is within the music industry.
Bedingfield
is the kind of star who plays the game according to the rules and
is actually one of those who used to come up with the rules behind the scene, writing songs for numerous pop singers, most notably co-writing
Miley Cyrus
' best song,
"Party in the USA."
knows what goes into a hit and what it takes to sell them. The problem is, she's desiring the hit too much on
, so she's throwing everything at the wall here, hoping one or two of the hits will click in a couple of different formats. On a track-by-track basis she can pull it off, particularly on the pair of
Dr. Luke
productions (
"Price Tag,"
coming complete with a
B.o.B
cameo, and
"Abracadabra"
), but as a whole
comes across as too desperate to please on
, a situation not helped by a truly weird sequencing that plays like a shuffle on haywire (why else would the live acoustic
"Big White Room"
be placed in the middle of the record when it sounds like a bonus track tacked onto a reissue released two months after the initial release?). ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine