Jewel, London Shepherd's Bush Empire

Review by Jim Alexander

It's a display of sycophantic applause rarely seen outside of a parents-only school concert. But prior to the appearance of the 23-year-old multi-million-selling Alaskan, you would be forgiven for thinking you had mistakenly stumbled into a cathedral, the only sounds disturbing the reverential air being the rustle of sensible coats and whispered sobriety.

Then they explode; yeehah-ing, decrying Britain for not giving the object of their affections a hit, sniggering guiltily when someone shouts "Power sucks!", as if party to some illicit rebellion, and applauding orgasmically if Jewel does so much as tap her foot and strum her guitar.

Which she does a lot. This is an endless array of folk and country strumalongs that are not so much tunes as gentle wisps of acoustic whimsy. Played with all the feeling of your average busker, this is everything that pop - exciting, youthful, majestic - isn't. To think otherwise you would have to be either over 30 or preternaturally dull, probably both.

Still, that famed voice is very impressive. She trills, warbles, yodels and howls like an operatic diva doing vocal exercises, but - the snarling revenge fantasies of 'Daddy' and 'Nicotine Love' aside - the lyrical content is bland beyond belief. Meaning pointless ditties about catching a cold, and squirmsome broken relationship banality.

Then she is joined on 'Foolish Games' by a bloke plonking a piano like it was a dead fish, and anyone still capable of rational thought desperately tries to spot the difference between this hideously-overblown and fatally-melodramatic warbling and Meat Loaf's 'I'd Do Anything For Love...'.

Jewel has somehow managed to fashion a glittering career out of a great voice and little else. Don't be dazzled.