The Sweet Escape
Interscope

These days, where Gwen Stefani is concerned, a default level of ghetto-fabulous pop glitz is par for the course. Indeed, since the years spent fronting No Doubt, the music industry has gathered together its finest focus groups, overhead projectors and flip charts to explain to Ms Stefani that her potential as an icon far outstrips the middling quality of her output in that other band.

Thankfully, their efforts weren’t in vain. By 2004, when her solo debut, Love Angel Music Baby, appeared, Stefani was strictly on-message with a clothing range (Lamb) and an entourage of Japanese Harajuku girls to detract from the fact that she was pregnant. Halle Berry and Britney wore dresses bearing her imprint; Martin Scorsese cast her as Jean Harlow in The Aviator; and, with Hollaback Girl, the chief Neptune Pharrell Williams helped her to deliver a hit that justified her new A-list status.

But handy as it is to have a hip-hop genius in your address book, the first single from Stefani’s second album comes as a thwacking great reminder that not everything that Williams does is touched with greatness. Wind It Up confirms that you can’t add beats to a chunk of The Lonely Goatherd and expect it to sound like anything other than something by the Austrian chancers Edelweiss. Don’t Get it Twisted, meanwhile, is a mystifyingly plain synth-rock anachronism.

With a coquettish vocal turn and a snaking orchestral R&B melody, Orange County Girl is rather better, as is a Numanesque cell-phone saga called Breakin’ Up. But it’s on the astonishing Yummy that we really see the duo hit creative paydirt. We’re talking early, early electropop on this one. For the faint of heart, there’s also a catchy chorus from Stefani to turn it all into great pop, but there’s also a bonkers pay-off too — a minute-long coda that sounds like Depeche Mode being eaten alive by their own equipment.

There are other songs here too that don’t have Williams on them. Like those offered up by the Neptunes’ producer, they’re variable. For Wonderful Life, Linda Perry zones in on the same minor chord yearning that yielded No Doubt’s indisputably ace Don’t Speak. Co-written by her No Doubt ex Tony Kanal, In The Morning is the sort of AOR plodder for which Natalie Imbruglia might barely show gratitude. On the heels of a Jay-Z album that features a guest turn from Chris Martin, it’s surprisingly unsurprising to note that Keane’s Tim Rice-Oxley is partly responsible for Early Winter. As Embrace wait by the phone for Missy Elliott’s call, Rice-Oxley will take no little pride in noting that he didn’t compromise himself — giving Stefani something that sounds like Keane, but with a girl.

But then, that’s hardly shocking either. As with its predecessor, you can listen to all of The Sweet Escape and be left with no clearer idea of what unique qualities Stefani brings to a song. She sounds like whoever helped to write her last tune. You could liken her more to a supermodel than designer. To a songwriter or a producer, that’s probably her appeal. To the rest of us, it leaves her just beyond our reach

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