CD Review: Natasha Bedingfield's Pocket Full Of Sunshine

London based blue-eyed soul singer Natasha Bedingfield’s second album is full of happy beats and empowering messages, but it almost never saw the light of an American day. Bedingfield actually recorded a whole different sophomore record, entitled N.B., which was only released in Europe. Thus Pocket Full of Sunshine is a bit of a Frankenstein, with old songs from the aborted N.B. and new tunes cobbled together into what is a decent but wholly generic pop record. Bedingfield is best-known Stateside for her tune “Unwritten”, used as the theme song for unreality show The Hills and an occasional campaign hymn for Barack Obama. That song, with its swirling strings and message of individualism, is a pop opus that cemented Bedingfield as a gal with something to say. She doesn’t quite reach those heights on Pocket Full of Sunshine, a record that concerns itself more with love and relationships, than independence and freedom. The problem here is not one of substandard music, though some of tunes chug along like an SUV from the mid-90’s, but of branding. Who is Natasha Bedingfield and why is she on my iPod? Pocket Full of Sunshine never quite answers that question.

Bedingfield definitely has a voice, but she doesn’t have a voice, if you know what I mean, which is basically that because she’s not the auteur of her own catalogue, she’s at the behest of whatever beats are proffered up to her. The myriad of producers listed as having worked on Pocket Full of Sunshine might be the reason for the record’s lack of personality. Bedingfield hops from topic to topic, applying the same silky vocal to each, but never differentiating between them. Cuts like “Soulmate” and the exuberant “Put Your Arms Around Me” (tailor made for weddings) are about enduring, endless love, while the cornball “Backyard” is about the asexuality of childhood morphing into defined gender roles. Um, what? I’m not insinuating that all records must have a theme or a concept, but some consistency would be nice. Other tracks don’t do much more to define Bedingfield for us. “Angel” could have been recorded by anyone and “Pirate Bones” is just stupid. By the end of Pocket Full of Sunshine, I felt like I had been listening to KISS FM for an hour without the benefit of a cheeky Rhianna song to break up the platitudes.

The only tune that stuck in my head after two days of listening was “Freckles”, a very cute paean to self-love with a catchy chorus. The summery sweet melody is genuinely bright and affecting; the song is as open as a gap-toothed smile. “A face without freckles is like the sky without the stars,” Bedingfield sings. It’s a clunky metaphor that could only be pulled off by an authentic pop star and Bedingfield shows us her credentials with a charming vocal. It’s always hard to swallow self-love anthems from size 2 cuties wearing Bikinis on MTV, but Bedingfield makes it work in a way that, say, mush-mouthed Fergie never could. To her credit, Bedingfield seems genuinely thrilled with her record but if you’re going to call your record Pocket Full of Sunshine, then you better bring the sunshine. Maybe on her next proper record, she will.