RCA
Pop, 2010

Diana Vickers has a voice that can never be considered boring. Sure, I have no idea what she is singing nearly all the time, and her voice will take some getting used to, but when it comes to pop music, boring is never a good thing. Therefore, Ms Vickers’s debut effort Songs From the Tainted Cherry Tree is never boring.

In fact, I’d go as far as to posit that it is Ms Vickers’s voice that elevates many of the songs here, which would be otherwise generic, into some kind of cacophonous beauty to behold. Me & You and Notice, for example, would have been some reject from Dolores O’Riordon’s repertoire, but Ms Vickers’s eccentric vocal stylistic transforms them into a love song of the banshees or something. Her choice to cover Björk’s Hit is in line with the agenda – Ms Vickers wants everyone to know that she wants to be compared to the likes of that eccentric kook than her fellow The X-Factor UK alumni Alexandra Burke and JLS.

If these songs were performed by someone else, someone with a more conventional pop radio voice, they would actually be rather generic radio-friendly anthems. In fact, the tunes here are assembled by the same people from the hit factories that helped Kylie Minogue, Britney Spears, and more pay their rent in the last few years. Thank goodness that Diana Vickers is so kooky then, as she would take these songs on a blender, channeling everyone from Siouxsie and the Banshees to Shakira while defying any easy comparison or labeling at the same time, and make them uniquely and only hers.