Corinne Bailey Rae: Corinne Bailey Rae

Herald rating: ***

Someone in the record company unhelpfully dubbed this chanteuse the new Billie Holiday - which only tells you that person may have seen the Diana Ross movie of Holiday's life but never heard Lady Day herself.

Rae is a pleasant and slightly sultry rnb-soul singer - but a new Holiday she is not. Rae, from Leeds not Philly, is the kind of singer much loved by record companies: she has a marketable voice which is hard to dislike; works across a spectrum ideal for radio (funky horn-punctuated soul on I'd Like To; breathy string-drenched girlieness on Butterfly; rnb manoeuvres on Breathless); and delivers a proper single in the slightly bluesy Like A Star (the track which seems to have drawn the Holiday comparisons).

She knows how best to use her range in the songs she writes and delivers some nice stuff: Put Your Records On is a slippery treat, Enchantment drifts by appealingly , and Choux Pastry Heart - or Shoe, Pastry, Heart as one reviewer heard it live - possesses a quite affecting simplicity. But there's little here that's different or sufficiently interesting over the long haul. What's the bet someone calls her the new Norah Jones soon?

Label: EMI