It would take a hard heart not to feel a twinge of sympathy for Corinne Bailey Rae. After just two singles, portents of doom are already whirling around her photogenic head. For a start, her name has regularly been mentioned in the same breath as that of Billie Holiday, not least by her record company, a comparison that will do for a female singer what the term "the new Dylan" does when applied to a folky songwriter: smother their career at birth by creating a completely unreasonable set of expectations. Worse, Bailey Rae has won the BBC's "sound of 2006" poll, which has previously predicted vast success for Tali, Gemma Fox, the Dears and Wiley, and was last year won by the Bravery, a band of whose career one might reasonably say that fireworks last longer.
Finally, BBC2's The Culture Show recently ran an astonishing item that compared Bailey Rae not just to Holiday, but to virtually every legendary black performer of the past 40 years: Stevie Wonder; Luther Vandross; Anita Baker. She is like Aretha Franklin, it explained, because she has sung in a church. By that reckoning, she is also like the Archbishop of Canterbury, but this thought was quickly supplanted by amazement that Bailey - who has gone to great pains in interviews to avoid being pigeonholed, mentioning her love of Led Zeppelin and L7 - hadn't simply given up and gone back home to Leeds in despair. She hadn't, which suggested that she bears being patronised very stoically, like the legendary black performer Sammy Davis Jr.
These are all bad omens, but on listening to the 26-year-old's debut album, any worries about her future evaporate in a flash: given the current musical climate, it is a record with vast commercial potential. The Billie Holiday comparisons turn out, unsurprisingly, to be a pitching it a bit high. Bailey Rae has a nice voice with a husky quality, but if having a nice voice with a husky quality were all you needed to warrant comparisons with Holiday then Mariella Frostrup would be up to her eyeballs in them.
In fact, like Norah Jones' much-vaunted jazz chops, the Billie Holiday tag exists primarily as bait - there to lure the all-important middle-aged Parky crowd, who require reassurance that the stuff they listen to is not a kind of aural soft furnishing, but "real music" with a lineage to a pre-rock'n'roll golden age. Once lured, Bailey Rae's songs won't do anything to scare them off. The ballads bear the influence of the aforementioned Jones. With its softly plucked acoustic guitar and lazy breakbeat, Like a Star sounds like it's waiting to soundtrack a tastefully shot perfume commercial. A hint of intriguing menace lurks on Choux Pastry Heart, but just a hint - nothing to disturb the conversation at your dinner party.
On the more uptempo tracks, the muted stabs of brass, electric piano, organ and strings set their cap at the arrangements Willie Mitchell constructed for Al Green in the early 1970s. But Mitchell's immaculate slickness was balanced by a degree of grit, not least the audible tension between sensuality and more spiritual matters in Green's voice. There's no equivalent tension here - Bailey Rae never really lets rip - and an array of writers-for-hire seem to have been assembled as a kind of specialist de-gritting team. Between them, they can claim credit for Christina Aguilera's Genie in a Bottle, Natasha Bedingfield's I Bruise Easily, Dido's Thank You and - if the Rod Bowkett who co-wrote Enchantment and Butterfly is the Rod Bowkett who played keyboards in 1970s prog-folkers Stackridge - the substantially less well-known What's Up There With Bill Stokes? and Pocket Billiards.
Occasionally their vast experience pays off: you can't deny that Put Your Records On is anything other than a beautifully crafted, expertly constructed pop song. More often, however, the results certainly recall the past, but a far more recent past than you suspect everyone involved thinks. Nobody ever mentions acid jazz these days: the whole genre seems to have been banished to history's dustbin, perhaps as punishment for burdening the world with Jamiroquai's noisome presence. Nevertheless, in the early 1990s it was the favoured music of a certain brand of twentysomething hipster, who it was hard not to feel didn't really like music that much.
And that's what Rae sounds like: the polite pop-funk that laboured under the misnomer of acid jazz, with a side-order of Norah Jones. For better or for worse, her success seems assured.
