Anastacia: 'Heavy Rotation'

The cover of Anastacia's fourth album shows the blonde belter draped across a bed with her stomach and plenty of cleavage on show. If this teasing pose came from Britney or Christina it wouldn't raise an eyebrow, but from the 40-year-old diva it feels slightly awkward. Sadly, this desire to seem youthful and contemporary is a key theme on Heavy Rotation, a record that often plays like a midlife crisis in musical form.

The crack team of producers includes Ne-Yo, Rodney Jerkins and Robbie Williams's old buddy Guy Chambers, and the concept is simple enough: make Anastacia relevant to the generation brought up on Amy Winehouse and Pussycat Dolls rather than Mariah and Whitney. The low-key disco of lead single 'I Can Feel You' is a decent indication of Anastacia's intentions here.

Unfortunately, she consistently fails to tame her foghorn vocals, smothering these tracks with a series of call-to-arms platitudes. The sixties girl group pop of 'The Way I See It' and soulful funk of 'Absolutely Positively' have 'Sound of 2008' stamped all over them, while the title track recalls recent Britney singles, but Anastacia too often overpowers the music. With her vocals stuck somewhere between a dirty old woman's cackle and a throat-bursting holler, understatement is conspicuous in its absence.

Lyrically, she never falters from her favourite subject of "standing up strong", even attempting to update 'I Will Survive' for the noughties on 'Defeated'. "You can say that you won but I'll never believe it," she roars. "I can't be defeated!" The cliche-ridden 'Same Song', where she tells us to throw our hands "in the air" and live "without a care", is just as uninspiring, pushing the star dangerously close to self-parody.

Whether those who bought Anastacia's first three albums will be charmed by her fourth remains to be seen, but the camp bombast of 'Never Gonna Love Again' and sunny pleasantries of 'In Summer' should make decent radio fodder. For everyone else, however, Heavy Rotation will be too cringe-inducing to bear the repeated listens that its title promises.