A weekly audience of nine million may struggle to see Simon Cowell for who he is, but Faryl Smith isn't one of them. Last year, when the 13-year-old runner-up in Britain's Got Talent resisted his chequebook she instantly won the admiration of the other 52 million people whose idea of a cosy Saturday night in doesn't involve watching a badly dressed Darth Vader with a £6 Mr Topper haircut slagging off people who fatten his franchise by humiliating themselves.

So here she is with her debut record - and, yes, the easiest thing to do when faced with an album by the new Charlotte Church is to be snooty. Under Cowell, though, it would have started with the Titanic theme and deteriorated from there. Instead, on Faryl Smith tackles Ave Maria, Brahms's Lullaby and Annie's Song with power and restraint. The arrangements by Jon Cohen suggest some kind of aesthetic endeavour beyond the basic thing for which they exist.

The basic thing for which they exist, of course, is Mother's Day. If Mother's Day matters more to the music industry than it once did, it's because, unlike anyone else, mums are still buying CDs. As a result, Lionel Richie, Ronan Keating and Barry Manilow have been left with little choice but to time their releases accordingly.

If you imagine the three engaged in a race with Mother's Day as the finish line, then Richie is sidelined by his own fatal naivety. New material? What on earth was he thinking of?

So nonexistent is the need for Just Go, a collection of featherlight machine-tooled R&B originals from Richie, that he really could have made some outrageous confession at the end of track eight and no one would have got far enough to ever find out.

But in a post X Factor era, where the sob story rules, Keating has adapted as resourcefully as an urban fox by delivering an album of songs his late mother apparently liked called, appropriately, Songs for My Mother. Had she lived long enough to hear him tackle Carrickfergus and I Believe I Can Fly in the style of the most self-satisfied pub singer on the planet, it might have been a different story.

If the cocksure Keating made an album called The Greatest Songs of the Nineties you suspect he'd stick half-a-dozen Boyzone numbers on there. It's no less fitting that on The Greatest Songs of the Eighties, Barry Manilow includes none of his. Instead, his version of Phil Collins's Against All Odds replaces Collins's scrunch-faced indignation with a weedy, put-upon sadness - a quality that also washes over Arthur's Theme and Careless Whisper.

Far from being intended as a criticism of Manilow, that's probably the locus of his appeal. He made it through the rain, remember? Indeed, “wet but alive” could be Manilow's perpetual Facebook status. And, for a particular kind of mum - the kind who can't find enough outlets to absorb her mothering urges - certain albums are more likely to end up in the CD tray than others. With 100,000 sales in four days we know Faryl is one of them. Poor Barry is another. Just make sure you give it to your mum at the end of your visit, lest you actually have to listen to it.

Faryl Smith: Faryl (UMC, TS £12.72)

Lionel Richie: Just Go (Mercury, TS £12.72)

Ronan Keating: Songs For My Mother (Polydor, TS £12.72)

Barry Manilow: The Greatest Songs Of The Eighties (Sony, TS £12.72)

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