Syco
Pop, 2012

After three years of silence, Leona Lewis emerges with Glassheart. The publicity materials claim that this is an introspective and honest record about her feelings and what not. Isn’t it amazing, therefore, how this thing sounds exactly like her last album?

The disastrous Collide, which owes much of its buoyancy to the sample of Avicii’s track, makes Leona Lewis sound like a Rihanna impersonator available for parties, but at least Collide is different. Alas, it’s relegated to the drawers of the second disc of the deluxe edition, an embarrassing anomaly in a track record of increasingly similar and monotonous dirges about failed love and tragic beauty.

There are the mid tempo tunes such as Come Alive and the title track, coated in tinkly-pinkly sounds and bass lines to disguise the fact that these songs are just more of the same old ballads injected with just enough speed – not much, in other words – to prevent the whole room from toppling over into sleep.

Ms Lewis is back in familiar territory when she brings on the power ballads. Fireflies, Stop the Clocks, When It Hurts… they all sound depressingly similar to the power ballads that have populated Ms Lewis’s previous two efforts.

The best song is probably Trouble, which borrows the bridge from Silence by Delirium and Sarah McLachlan, mostly because it stands out as a track that doesn’t sound like the same song Ms Lewis had done sixty times before.

Glassheart is an album by Leona Lewis, and by this point, I’ve heard it all before.