Mind Body And Soul - Joss Stone > Reviews > Can Ms Stone follow up Sessions?

Author's product rating:   

Originality	Definitely a cut above the rest
Lyrics	Standard
Quality and consistency of tracks	A couple of weak links
Value for Money

Advantages:	beautiful voice, some great songs, different to other young artists around .
Disadvantages:	those who don't like her voice may get bored

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

“For me, personally, Mind, Body and Soul is my real debut." –Joss Stone

Perhaps you might not recognise the name, Joss Stone. You might not recognise her in the street either. But the chances are you’ll recognise this girl’s voice. There are few people in this world blessed with a truly unique voice: Steven Tyler is one of them, Heather Small is (unfortunately) another, and Joss Stone must surely be added to this category. Her first album, The Soul Sessions, sold over two million copies and hit the top 10 in 13 countries, despite being originally planned as an informal release to generate publicity for this, her second offering. The Soul Sessions was really just an album of covers, put together fairly quickly with the sole purpose of showcasing Joss’s vocal talents. Here, predictably, Ms Stone tries her hand at co-writing a few songs. – 11 out of the 14 on the album, to be precise. It is a pretty good effort, particularly for a seventeen-year-old girl, but I imagine the presence of soul legends Betty Wright and Desmond Child amongst others helped more than a little.

The album opens in a very laid-back style, with the second single from this album, Right To Be Wrong. It’s a soulful track where Joss asserts her independence, possibly in reply to the (few) critics who dismissed her first album as unoriginal: “Got a right to be wrong, I gotta sing my own song, I might be singing outta key, but it sure feels good to me.”

We then move into a couple of more upbeat numbers, Jet Lag and You Had Me. Both are quite poppy, in fact you can imagine You Had Me being performed by someone like Jamelia or Destiny’s Child. It’s easily the most mainstream song on the album. Jet Lag takes a while to get going, but when it does it has a nice jazzy rhythm to it.

Joss’s voice is pretty good on Spoiled, but as a down-tempo ballad, it doesn’t really seem to fit in here, between You Had Me and two of the highlights of the album, Don’t Cha Wanna Ride and Less Is More. Both are slightly poppy songs, extremely catchy and good showcases for Joss’s voice. Security is absolutely amazing, it starts as a beautiful ballad, then escalates into a fantastically soulful finale, for those of you who own The Soul Sessions this reminds me a lot of Some Kind Of Wonderful.

The upbeat run of songs continues through Young At Heart and Snakes and Ladders, which for me is a quite interesting song lyrically. One of the problems with the album is that the lyrics in places are kind of bland, although this doesn’t matter so much because really they’re only a showcase for Joss’s voice. Understand is for me one of the best songs on the album, although many dismiss it as simply an uninspiring ballad. I like it for the melody which is kind of quirky, and again for Joss’s voice. I know I keep going on about that but I love it!

Don’t Know How is fairly middle-of the road, a bit of a filler song to be honest. I don’t think it would ever perform well as a single, likewise Torn and Tattered. Killing Time is one of the tracks where the adlibs get a bit much – as Joss herself croons in Less Is More, “too much of a good thing can be bad.” At this point, track 13, those who aren’t huge fans of Joss will probably be a bit fidgety.

Closing the album is Sleep Like A Child, a slow ballad with a beautiful performance from Joss, and the bonus track, Holding Out For A Hero. No, not the one Bonnie Tyler did. This is a track I thought was really weird at first, but now I adore it. Joss’s voice is completely different on this song, and the emotion she has turns it from a strange piano ballad to a desperate, haunting piece which draws you right in.

Mind, Body and Soul has already done quite well in the album charts, as did You Had Me in the singles chart. Right To Be Wrong entered at 29 this week, although in my opinion it was the wrong song to choose as a single – I would have gone for Don’t Cha Wanna Ride, Less Is More, or maybe Security.

If I could have given this album 4½ stars I would have, but I don’t think it’s worth the full five purely because there’s not much variety, it all starts to sound the same after a while listening to it. It’s really Joss’s vocal talents that make this album a success, rather than the song quality, which isn’t as consistent as it could be. It is refreshing though, to listen to an album that isn’t over-produced and polished to within an inch of it’s life. All of the songs have a natural feel to them, and I believe a few of them were recorded in ‘real time’, which is a novelty with a lot of the newer, younger artists today.

The album inlay is nothing special, although it just include the lyrics, which is a bonus. There’s a few pictures of Ms Stone, who, my male contemporaries assure me, is “well fit.” She does tend to overdo the hippie look a bit in the pictures, but it’s not really a big deal.

So the real question: is this album for you? If you liked The Soul Sessions, you’ll love it. If you like Joss’s voice, you’ll love it. Unless you’ve had a really bad experience with Joss or her music in the past, I can’t really imagine that you’ll hate it. You might not be a huge fan, but there’s just nothing about this album controversial enough to be hated. It’s simply a young girl with an extremely precocious voice singing a bit of old-school soul mixed with some more modern, R‘n’B beats, and doing it well.