Remi Nicole: 'My Conscience And I'

Ever since The Streets started singing three minute pop songs about birds, downing cans of Stella and popping pills down Birmingham's discotheques, it's been a free-for-all on observational lyrics from UK popstars. You can become a street poet and gritty 'real' artist these days by simply mentioning something about kebabs, Reebok trainers or accentuating your regional accent in a couple of your tunes. Throw in a few gobby remarks about how everybody else is 's**t' and you'll be well on your way to the cover of the NME. Remi Nicole is, therefore, treading fairly well-worn ground with her debut album My Conscience And I. Despite her protests that she'd never heard the records of Allen or Nash when she made this, it's a certainty that her record label will have done, which is probably why they let her release this clunky, half-baked and often cringe-worthy album.

From the opening 'Go With The Flow' we meet a girl who sounds like she'd rather be doing a million and one other things. The first lines of: "One day I was in an office job / The next I was doing what I didn't know I loved / It happened so quickly but it seems to work with me", are so half-arsed and lackadaisical, it's hard to believe that she really appreciates her new-found pop stardom. The rest of the LP follows suit with lyrics that barely fit together and leave you clawing at your ears. Her stilted and jarring lyrical flow is probably supposed to sound endearing, but, unlike Mike Skinner, she can't make up for her weak voice with lyrical pearls.

'Tabloid Queen' - the centre-piece of the album - is Nicole's blast at the likes of Heat magazine and cheap celebrities for, shock horror, being materialistic and making young girls think that beauty is skin deep. The intention is sweet enough, but the execution is pretty shonky. Her repeated cries for people to try out "in-div-id-ual-ity" (that's how she pronounces it - presumably to make it sound very complex and philosophical) is the sort of reverse prejudices that you'd expect to hear in the NME or Nathan Barley. Come on man wear your skinny jeans and cut your hair funny so you can be individual *cough* and just like us *cough*.

Nicole's songs are also marred by her tendency to stick in childhood references in a bid to add some 'realism' to her otherwise rather dull tales of growing up. In the slightly bizarre 'New Old Days', she lists board games (Guess Who, Connect 4, Murder In The Dark), TV shows (Grange Hill, Byker Grove, Fun House) and just about anything else she can remember from her childhood (Sean Maguire, Kris Kros, Naff Naff jackets), in the manner of someone playing the conveyor belt round of the The Generation Game. Maybe it's because the stuff she talks about doesn't rouse warm nostalgia as much as they do bad memories; perhaps it's the fact these events occurred in such recent memory that it seems ridiculous to pine after them; or maybe it's just the fact that it shows such a blase attitude to lyric-writing. Either way, it doesn't quite ring true.

The concept on paper sounded interesting enough: north London gal with a bit of spikiness, good looks and background in performance arts writes some tunes about living in London, doing rubbish jobs and dating rubbisher boys. On her recent single ''Rock 'n' Roll', she more than aptly pulls it off. Ranting about being dubbed an R&B star because of her race and telling us all that she's "got no back" is fun, fluffy indie-pop. It sounds like Remi's having a laugh at herself, and we're allowed in on the joke. Unfortunately for the rest of the record, she's more interested in sulking and playing the louche, I'm-too-cool-to-even-bother attitude. On the likes of 'Dates From Hell' and 'Na Nighty',where she slags off rotten blokes she's had dalliances with, you half expect Catherine Tate to pop up and scream "Bovvvered!" mid-way through. There's an attitude on here, but it's more akin to a spoilt brat than a cheeky, perky popstar or a wizened rocker. If she can't solve that, she'll be heading back to the office jobs she hates so much - quicker than she ever imagined.