Until this year Joss Stone’s voice had done many things in its young life: appeared on the BBC’s Star for a Night at the age of 14; got her a record deal at 15; made a million-selling album at 16. Until this year, however, it had yet to make high-ranking EMI executives cry real tears. Three weeks ago, at the Brits, it managed to do that, too, when – transformed into a preposterous mid-American twang – it exhorted Britain to show some “big, big, big lurve” for troubled Robbie Williams so that he could be “strahng”.

Oblivious to the unprecedented surge on the national grid of cringe, Stone continued with a burst of Amy Winehouse’s Rehab. If you didn’t know any better, you would have thought that Stone was trying to show us that she could sing the song better than Winehouse had just minutes before.

Which, of course, she can’t. Not even close. It has yet to occur to Stone that being a fabulous technician doesn’t stop you from being a dull singer. Recently, Stone confessed that she never much liked the passable Southern Soul pastiches of her first two albums. Fans who spent their money on those records will no doubt be reassured to learn that, as executive producer, Stone is personally overseeing everything this time.

Presumably, then, the sleek R&B direction flagged up by the new single Tell Me ’Bout It is her idea – as is the opening monologue from the former Brit-thug du jour Vinnie Jones. “Sometimes,” says Jones, pondering the nature of change, “we regard it as a metaphor that reflects the way things ought to be.” Even Dan Brown would struggle to extract a gram of meaning from such nonsense. But then, maybe it’s just a woman thing.

Stone may be assisted by the sometime D’Angelo collaborator Raphael Saadiq, but songs such as Headturner and Put Your Hands on Me spill out empowerment buzz-phrases like an Oprah episode on fast-forward. “Girls we gotta work it like we do,” reports Stone from the Kentucky of her mind. At no point is there an onlooking female crowd cheering, “Go Joss! Go Joss!” And yet somehow you can almost hear them.

If only other clichés were similarly inaudible. There are hitherto undiscovered tribes in Qatar who knew that at some point during this mostly pointless album, a black American man – in this case Common – would appear on the intro of a song and say “Joss Stone” for no good reason.

Sound bad? If it was bad, Introducing would at least be interesting. In fact, nothing here (well, nothing that doesn’t have Vinnie Jones in it) dips beneath the level of competence – not even the soul-sapping hack ballad-eering of Diane Warren’s Bruised but not Broken.

Let’s not deny, then, that fortysomething female marketing executives in elasticated trouser suits need something to listen to while they wait for their M&S Gastropub meal to ping. And as long as they do, Introducing might just fit the bill. But even this most forgiving of fanbases would have to concede that this is a voice incapable of expressing love for anything other than itself.

Relentless/EMI

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