Donna Summer: 'Crayons'

Seventeen years is a massive gap between albums for any recording artist, but for a singer working in the fickle, youth-obsessed arena of dance-pop it's pretty much unheard of. Think of all the dance and pop trends that Donna Summer's sat out since her last album, 1991's Mistaken Identity: big beat, trance, French house; boybands, Britney, Timbaland... and that's just scratching the surface.

But Summer seems keen to position herself as a relevant, contemporary artist again, hiring producers who've crafted recent hits for Kylie, Shakira and Leona Lewis to ensure her comeback album sounds fresh and modern. Crayons is the work of an artist hungry for hits, but also one who's lacking in confidence, a trait that manifests itself in Summer's slightly desperate bid to cover all the bases. She flits restlessly here between hard-edged dance-pop, identikit R&B, pizza restaurant Latin, schlocky but melodic ballads, summery reggae-pop and slightly dated seven-minute house workouts.

This relentless genre-hopping would make sense from a teenage pop starlet looking to find her niche in the chart landscape, but it's less becoming from a 59-year-old woman who can legitimately call herself a legend. Why would the disco queen who gave us 'I Feel Love' and 'Bad Girls' choose to sound like Rihanna, as she does on the title track, or Tina Turner, whom she channels on 'Slide Over Backwards'? Several other tracks are strangely anonymous, with Summer's no-longer-youthful voice offering the only clue that we're listening to somebody who's made a fair bit of music in her time.

A handful of tracks offer the sense of occasion that her comeback deserves, particularly the bombastic 'Stamp Your Feet', with its smart playground chant hooks, and the electro-tinged 'Science Of Love', which has a memorable chorus. 'The Queen Is Back', meanwhile, shows some of the personality that's lacking elsewhere, as Summer name-checks 'On The Radio' and 'Love To Love You' while fantasising about a triumphant return to the music scene.

But only the surging disco-rock of 'Fame (The Game)' really adds to Summer's legacy. A lacerating send-up of the "hair extensions, botox and faux-forced interventions" of modern celebrity, it's the one track on Crayons that sounds like something only Donna Summer could do; not coincidentally, it's also the one time that this comeback album feels truly vital.