It's easy to knock Katie Melua for lowering the bar of MOR beigeness before she'd even turned 20. Her startlingly successful 2003 debut, Call off the Search (1.8m copies in the UK alone), exuded the joyless maturity of one of those 13-year-old Oxbridge maths prodigies.

By the same token, though, some respect is due for turning her back on teenage pop norms, a course she follows on her second album. It's not without its charms - she and Wombling mentor Mike Batt, who produced and wrote most of it, make a feature of the forlorn twang to her voice in a series of blues-based tracks.

Johnny Mercer's Blues in the Night is exceptionally pretty, in a hotel-lounge sort of way; ditto the pleasantly melancholy title track, which blends vocal technique and unfeigned wistfulness. CS

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