Rachel Stevens • Come & Get It

Rachel Stevens
Come & Get It

Take seven unnaturally polite post-pubescents, add generous helpings of hit factory pop droppings and garnish with guidance from Simon ‘Svengali’ Fuller. Leave mostly uncovered for a few years before separating the mixture and leaving to cool. Seize a generic pop princess cookie cutter and voila! you too can make yourself a Rachel Stevens. With so little of her debut solo outing Funky Dory clinging favourably to the tastebuds, Stevens has everything to prove with this second dish, and while it’s still no eureka moment in the evolution of pop music, she succeeds at least in dispensing with flogging the now lifeless S Club horse. With Funky Dory essentially just a retread of her days of sharing the limelight, Stevens’s solo career looked dead in the water. Cue a hasty reinvention and a few ‘borrowed’ ideas from the likes of Goldfrapp, and all of a sudden there was life in the proverbial old dog yet.

The ‘frappian single ‘Some Girls’ is repeated here for the benefit of fans not willing to shell out for the bolstered reissue of its predecessor. Indeed, this feels rather less like an album than a meticulously planned strategy for total chart domination. How often is it these days that you get four singles released in the run up to a record? It’s just as well then that the songwriters and producers behind it (including Karen and Shelly Poole, Richard X, Rob Davis and former S Club hitmakers Jewels & Stone) have managed to conjure up some tunes well worthy of attention.

In particular, Richard X’s ‘80s retro-electro influence really makes its mark. In a similar vein to Goldfrapp’s ‘Ooh La La’, most recent single ‘I Said Never Again (But Here We Are)’ calls on late ‘80s glam-a-likes Adam & The Ants and combines their influence with some rather dubious but entertaining lyrics. Elsewhere, ‘Je M’Appelle’ is a spiky mid-tempo R&B number that suits Stevens well, while the pseudo nursery rhyme ‘Secret Garden’ displays a vocal style heavily borrowed from Kylie Minogue’s ‘Chocolate’, though this may have been intentional given that both songs sprang from the pen of Karen Poole. Making an unapologetic play for the fantasies of Stevens’s young male fans, ‘Crazy Boys’ teases with its chunky beats and solid bassline underpinning her moans and groans.

While the songs are, for the most part, amply strong enough to carry her, Stevens’s struggle for success has always been marred by the music coming second to her image. Sure, it’s worked for others, but somehow she lacks the likeability factor that separates Kylie from Dannii and Robbie from Gary. Targeting the loins of the boys won’t necessarily translate into healthy sales if she cannot endear herself to the sisterhood also. Even with some of the finest songwriters in pop putting rockets under Rachel, you can’t help feeling that some of Come & Get It has gone to waste on something of a damp squib.

[Polydor; October 17, 2005]