Cheryl Cole: Messy Little Raindrops - review

Coming from a member of one of the most forward-looking pop acts of the 21st century, Messy Little Raindrops feels curiously dated. It's one thing for Cheryl Cole to honour fashion's ludicrous obsession with the bad-taste 1980s on the sleeve, but several songs might as well have been recorded in that decade, too. Which isn't to say that Raindrops, The Flood or Hummingbird sound retro-hip; instead they are musically perfunctory, their lacklustre quality exacerbated by Cole's weakness as a balladeer and her (understandable) difficulty injecting feeling into a love song. Still, in opening tracks Promise This and Yeah Yeah she has a couple of fantastic, indelible hits. And Cole is on surer ground addressing cheating men, although it's hard to know what satisfaction she finds in the vapid lyrics to Happy Tears: "I cut off my hair and I painted my toes, I sold all the diamonds and burnt all your clothes."