ALBUM: Jess Glynne 'I Cry When I Laugh'

Rating:

When breaking out as a solo artist after years of providing guest vocals, it is essential to sever the links and emerge as an artist in your own right. Despite clearly being a very talented singer with several delightful tracks, Jess Glynne never shakes off the whole “singer with the big red hair that’s on all the Clean Bandit tracks” reputation.

I Cry When I Laugh is a very safe album, something that is fairly unadventurous but is guaranteed to be fairly popular. It fails to have a great degree of variance, however it does have very little in the way of filler, with the majority of tracks either having already worked well in the charts or songs that could do well there.

Tracks such as ‘Love Me’ and ‘Ain’t Got Far To Go’ are more of the same from Jess and will be guarantee dancefloor fillers if made into singles. The Disclosure-esque ‘Strawberry Fields’ and the sombre ‘Saddest Vanilla’, the collaboration with Emeli Sande, do provide a bit of variance and give us a brief look into some more styles that Jess should have probably explored a bit more on her debut album.

This being said, each song is well thought out and Jess does sterling work delivering a series of songs that fits well under the category of pop without being tedious or mind numbing. It’s little surprise that the summer hit ‘Not Letting Go’ is the strongest song on the album and favourites ‘Hold My Hand’, ‘Real Love’ and ‘Don’t Be So Hard On Yourself’ help the listener remember how many strong singles Jess Glynne has had in a short space of time.

Sadly throughout the album the influences of Clean Bandit’s Jack Patterson and songwriter Janee Bennett are too evident. The album contains at least 3 tracks from Clean Bandit’s album with several others such as ‘Love Me’ and ‘Home Explicit’ too similar to the keyboard and violin based pop group.

In recent years, we’ve seen the likes of Sam Smith, John Newman and numerous others provide guest vocals before striking out on their own. The difference however lies in the fact that they went in very different directions to their earlier work. Sam Smith’s debut album for example had very little similarity to his Naughty Boy or Disclosure collaboration. For Jess Glynne, the Clean Bandit hangover looms heavily over her and she fails to be anything more than a guest collaborator on her own album.

I Cry When I Laugh is released on 21st August via Atlantic Records.