Seven Rainbows
3/5
Duffy, Rumer, Lauren Pritchard, Ellie Goulding… commercial pop’s appetite for confessional female singer-songwriters – especially those with a retro-soul or indie-folk bent – seems insatiable. How else to explain their conveyer-belt frequency?

Latest off the production line is Ms Gold, but her pop is less manicured, her retroism derived not from the old soul divas, but rather from Nina Simone’s blues and the swaggering rock ’n’ roll of Janis Joplin. It seems she admires Björk, Robert Plant and The Kills too, so has more creative balls than her peers (a good thing), but the songs on her Dan Carey-produced debut don’t fit together well, and there are some ugly misfires.

Conversations of Love’ suggests Alison Mosshart produced by Portishead (thumbs up), but ‘Orbiter’ is a ghastly, quasi-emo shouter, the reggae lite of ‘Cry Cry Cry’ could hardly be less lachrymose and ‘End of the World’ sounds like a song The Feeling rejected. We’d say Gold shows promise, but honestly doubt there’ll be a second album to fulfil it.