You can't blame a work of art for its eventual audience, is what The Duke would suggest. When Paul was scribbling those Emails to the Corinthians or whoever a couple thousand years ago, he couldn't have known that Jerry Falwell would be a fan. It's not Eminem's fault that much of his fanbase exhibits exactly the kind of bigoted, thuggish yob mentality that he so subtly satirizes. And you can't really fault Katie Melua for the fairly certain inevitability that her debut album, Call Off The Search, will serve as the requisite soundscape at cheese-tasting parties from now till whenever the hell someone digs up another round of Eva Cassidy demos.

Young Miss Melua has a voice worth exhibiting, make no mistake about it. When she lets rip over a self-penned ditty like Faraway Voice, a song dedicated to the aforementioned Cassidy, a song that should by all rights be cloying dreck, it's impossible not to be impressed as all hell with how she wraps her larynx around some really rather complex melodic tomfoolery.

But the occasional bursts of inspiration, be it in the form of the 12-bar barroom blues of My Aphrodisiac Is You, a song that brings to mind that old standard about I Get A Kick Out Of You by, I think, Slipknot, or the subtly funky second track, Crawling Up A Hill, are beaten asunder by the sheer stifling, well, middle classness of it all.

It's so conservative, so faceless, that at times you may be fooled into thinking a song has an alarmingly evocative lyric, but no, it's just cause you dozed off twenty minutes ago and had a dream about this time when you were nine years old. You can't be blamed though, man, most of these numbers are indistinguishable from one another.

The whole thing suffers from an absence of heart, of the "passion". At times it feels like there's something really soulful and powerful underway, but no, it's just another production-line easy listening Norah Jones-lite affair.

You could pound this disc to fuck with a pickaxe for a month and I doubt it would leave a scratch. It's solid granite; Impenetrable, bloodless and mighty painful when it gets you in the ears.

The final track, for instance, Lilac Wine, starts with a sinister tone and a raspy verse that brings to mind Bille Holiday's original recording of Strange Fruit. Katie Melua doesn't want to talk about lynchings or segregation, though, she's just concerned about some fella or other. The "love" thing. You might yawn if you weren't sniggering.