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So, the ice maiden returneth - she who looks like a babe and sings like an angel. A ready template for this follow-up to her ten-million-selling debut would surely have been to indulge in a big, expansive production, drenching songs of fashionable angst and empty bombast in slickly smug saccharine soul. But never underestimate Jewel Kilcher. This is an acoustically-based work of limpid beauty and subtle intensity. It is also significantly better, and more mature, than its bold if uneven predecessor. The album opens with a simply strummed acoustic guitar and tender, intimate vocal that builds slowly to a measured but mighty crescendo. 'We
must demand more, not from each other, but more from ourselves,' she sings, articulating a typical and telling Jewel philosophy.
This is beautiful music, crafted for the mainstream, acceptable to all and yet shot through with the kind of passion, urgency, flair and vitality so utterly lacking in Dion, Carey, Morrissette and Crow. Certainly, Jewel has a way with a song, a hook and a melody, and the production, too, is perfect: lush, deft, sensitively understated and never overblown. Most of all, though, her voice is superb: soft, soaring, effortless and majestic. Lauryn Hill may
have melded the year's finest work of classic tradition and contemporary soul, but this too, though less hip, is a work of simple and true classic song. Offering nothing new but sounding like no one else, 'Spirit' is a significant confirmation of a major talent.
Ross Fortune.
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