If Gabriella Cilmi were the first teenager to release a neo-soul record this decade, critics for miles would be yelling about her from the rooftops. Unfortunately, Joss Stone got to the party first (wearing a great dress, I might add) and no one’s looked back since. Not me, anyway.

When I first heard Stone’s Soul Sessions album back in 2003, I was shocked to learn she was only 16 years old. I’d never heard a girl so young demonstrate that kind of emotional gravity and vocal maturity.

What’s more, her producers (who included Betty Wright and ?uestlove) made great musical decisions. They covered old R&B and country tunes (by diverse names like Waylon Jennings, Aretha Franklin and John Sebastian), hired a great group of veteran session players and stuck close to the plan for the record to be true “soul sessions”. It worked: the album was a success and Stone, now a wizened 21 years old and looking pretty good on the beach, has soul music bonafides worldwide .

Such is not the case with Gabriella Cilmi.

While Cilmi, herself just 16-years old, has considerable talent and the look of a star, she lacks the fire that made Stone so captivating so quickly. Stone sounded like everything she was saying — and the way she was saying it — was a simple extension of her real experience.

Cilmi sounds like someone who’s trying too hard to evoke a feeling. Instead of stealing the souls of to her supposed influences, Nina Simone and Janis Joplin, and ingesting them into her own music, she sounds like she’s borrowing them for return at a later time. She makes a valiant effort, painting songs like Awkward Game and Santuary with the Simone-like colors, but clearly her lack of experience shows through.

For her lack of maturity (and the unfortunate comparison to others more talented), Cilmi can be forgiven. She’s young, she’s beautiful, she will have a career ahead of her.

Her inexperience, however, is just a small part of what makes this a record that doesn’t work. The greater responsibility lays in on the back of Xenomania, the UK production team built around Brian Higgins.

While Higgins and Co. put together some nice sounds, there’s an inconsistency that makes it hard to come home to Cilmi and find the place where she lives. At once, she’s an R&B diva (Awkward Game), a post-New Wave dance goddess (Dont Want To Go To Bed Now), pop tartlet (her YouTube hit, Sweet About Me) and psychedelic 60’s throwback (Einstein). On their own, there’s interesting things to hear in each song but, as whole, the album ping-ponging hop from style to style is wholly unfulfilling.

In her WIkipedia entry, clearing written by some record company doofuss hired because he was friends with Cilmi in elementary school, it says that Cilmi’s influences are Nina Simone, Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin, The Sweet, T-Rex and Cat Stevens. The Lesson To Be Learned for Cilmi is this: pick one of these, find a producer who’s an expert in the style and bring us an album that we can live with all the way through.

Though the soul of Sanctuary is nice, I recommend she find a hot L.A. producer, spend some time with Elvis Costello records and give us a ‘new’ New Wave record. She has plenty of time.

These files have been removed from this post at the request of the copyright holder. That’s cool. I didn’t really like the record all that much anyway.

Gabriella Cilmi - Don’t Wanna Go To Bed

Gabriella Cilmi - Messy

Gabriella Cilmi - Got No Place To Go

Gabriella Cilmi - Sanctuary

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 7:19 am and is filed under Props and Missives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.