Corinne Bailey Rae Corinne Bailey Rae (EMI) £11.99

Forget Arctic Monkeys. If any artist has tumbled into 2006 on a gush of critical love so effusive that widened arteries are needed to contain it, it's songthrush Corinne Bailey Rae. Her low-key EP last November begat a pivotal Jools Holland appearance; an annual BBC poll of critics voted her as the new artist most likely to mop up this year. The release of her debut album has been brought forward a week, because the elves indentured in Amazon's warehouses can't cope with the pre-orders. An exaggeration, perhaps. But this is a record that will be inescapable this year, played everywhere tasteful grown-ups gather.

Hearing her debut album, you would never know Bailey Rae hails from Leeds, and spent time in the sort of indie band that might have shared toilets with the formative Kaiser Chiefs. She has emerged into the limelight fully formed, a homegrown voice somewhere between Norah Jones and Macy Gray. Her instrument is both gossamer and crackly, working best at intimate pitches and - it must be said - in controlled doses.

The song that kickstarted the fuss, 'Like a Star' is Bailey Rae's most Norah-like moment, a soft-pedal love song whose charm has endured. 'Enchantment' is a twinkle in a minor key that has more than a little trip hop about it. 'Put Your Records On', her current single, is feel-good summertime soul-pop.

But then comes 'Til It Happens to You', a flawed attempt at staking out some of Alicia Keys' territory. And the whole edifice starts cracking. Over the course of the next seven tracks, Bailey Rae's qualities - her whisper-in-your-ear voice, literate lyrics, old soul stylings - begin to dissolve as her record boils down to so much nicey-nicey mush. Hers is a deceptively pretty album that doesn't actually stand up to repeated listenings. She starts out like a breath of fresh air; she ends up rather samey, her vocal eccentricities revealed as an ickle girl tic.

It's a shame: Bailey Rae promised so much. We could do with our own vault-voiced Alicia Keys, or a songwriter at home with both the lofty and profane as Lauryn Hill was. In Corinne Bailey Rae, hyped beyond her powers, we have neither.