Generations of hapless young men have been attracted by the archetypal "girl next door" on the grounds that beneath that innocent exterior lurks some undiscovered tigress. This may be part of LeAnn Rimes's appeal. In many respects, she is shockingly ordinary. Bouncing on to stage in a pink top and blue jeans, she has little more star quality than the hordes of similar girls next door in her audience. Her music is the epitome of mundane - airbrushed country rock; endless AOR anthems, tailor-made for motorway cafes and local radio. In the first few songs, the blonde seashell tells us that she wants to see how far she can run, that life goes on and, in a moment of rebellion, that she doesn't like to turn the radio on (and who can blame her, if it plays nothing but LeAnn Rimes?)

However, there's a tantalising hint of something more thrilling in her enormous molten voice. Alas, discovering the tigress depends on wading through an hour of slop. She insists that a new number is "my favourite song in years", and that recording with Ronan Keating she made a "big, big friend". But occasionally there are signs that waters run much deeper.

Rimes once sued her record company on the grounds that her contract - signed by her parents when she was 12 - prevented her being "her own person". Albums of death metal didn't follow, but on the new Aerosmith-ish Won't Be Alone Long, Rimes suggests that beneath the anodyne country kitten dwells a frustrated rock'n'roller. She comes alive when paying tribute to an unexpected heroine - Janis Joplin - and the following dip into Joplin's catalogue is full of bluesy swagger. For an encore, she even rocks violently into Led Zeppelin's Rock'n'Roll and, faintly outrageously, touches her boob. She's hardly selling her soul to the devil, but this unexpected raucousness could convince anyone with resilient hearing to want to live next door to LeeAnn Rimes.

· At the Hammersmith Apollo, London W6 (0870 6063400), tonight, then touring.