Columbia
Pop, 2012

With Katy Perry, Ke$ha, and various pop tarts from across the Atlantic strutting up the charts with songs that sound like they come from the same tune mart, it is inevitable that someone from the UK would want to join the party too. To be fair, Rita Ora has been around for a while, and her vocals seem far stronger than most of the pop tarts in the charts.

Unfortunately, Ora doesn’t seem any different from the other albums featuring the same kind of pop tarts making the same kind of music. It’s not surprising: the same old names crop up in the production credits – will.i.am, Stargate, and the rest. Roc the Light ain’t bad at all, but it seems like a poor man’s version of Ke$ha’s Don’t Stop, for example. Shine Ya Light, Facemelt, and other songs aren’t bad at all, and Hello, Hi, Goodbye hints at how Ms Ora could really rock the stage with her vocals if she chooses to. But they are all well-produced tracks that don’t stand out from the competition.

Ora isn’t bad, but it isn’t great as well. It’s stuck in the middling zone called “totally forgettable”. Unless she gets something more interesting in her repertoire that distinguishes her from the rest, she’s in danger of being mistaken for a Ke$ha impersonator.