Leona Lewis: Echo

Leona Lewis
Echo
Sony

Leona Lewis doesn’t so much deal in power ballads as exhaustingly empowered ballads. Her second album Echo finds her emoting over hammering snare drums, baroquely orchestrated arrangements that swell like vast teardrops and melodramatically uplifting key changes.

It’s all very X-Factor, which Lewis won in 2006, and not without a certain schmaltzy appeal: I’d rather listen to her warbling about self-fulfilment than some dismal indie band moaning on about alienation.

But the lack of variation proves fatal. With the exception of “Outta My Head”’s enjoyable deviation into synth-pop, each track follows the same formula. The best is a choir-assisted cover of Oasis’s “Stop Crying Your Heart Out”, which has a show-stopping grandiloquence, but the rest of the songs are routine.

For all the self-empowerment rhetoric, this is a machine-like, stiflingly unimaginative album.