Reviewed by James Attlee

The all-important second album for Lavine and Virgin have wheeled out the guns. Phil Collins has written a song, Phil Bailey and BeBe Winans sing backups, Rhett Laurence (Maria Carey produces most of the tracks. The Collins song 'All I Need" lets her make use of her lower register where she sounds well soulful. Lavine has an impressive range but too many stratospheric high notes can be a bit wearing. The strength of "All I Need" is that it's got a built-in solid chorus - a real pop song in fact. But you can see why Collins left it off the 'But Seriously' album. Lyrically, it's not really saying much - there's no lyrical hooks to go with the musical hooks. This is a weakness of the album as a whole. It's difficult for gospel trying to move into "inspirational" mould. When you take out the admittedly often banal lyrical content of traditional style gospel you're left with warmed-over-soul of the let's-all-join-hands-and-save-the-world variety. About half the tracks come into this category while the others are mostly about L-O-V-E (a generalised Cosmic Love that could emanate from Heaven, Boyfriend or Brothers and Sisters). The production throughout is safe and clean in a very Los Angeles kind of way. There's no doubt Lavine's got a voice that could melt vinyl given the right song to sing. But like a lot of great singers she feels under pressure to be a songwriter as well as an interpreter of other people's material. On the evidence of this album she hasn't yet got the chops to come up with an album's worth of songs. Sadly, not so much between two worlds as between two stools

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