Another week, another female singer trying to merge Alanis Morissette's lyrical convolutions, Sheryl Crow's tuneful rock chickery and that hint of kookiness Jewel embraces with such alarming gusto. It's a while since there was a worthy pretender, but Eileen Rose Giadone comes close and, crucially, she's very much her own woman.
This Irish-Italian-American hails from the wrong side of the Boston tracks, but she has lived in Britain for a decade, bumbling along in bottom feeder bands such as Medici Slot Machine and Fledgling, who troubled themselves with neither charts nor critical acclaim. No matter: Eileen Rose's co-produced, self-written debut solo album, Shine Like It Does, is a gem and although she occasionally slips into waifdom, she has the brassy yet coy presence of her closest musical sister, Aimee Mann.
She announces that she feels "a little slutty tonight" but, as if to prove she's a woman's woman too, offers the sage advice that "a woman with a correctly fitted brassiere is a happy woman". She can cackle like Marianne Faithfull and scream like Patti Smith, but her sights are set higher. When she twists herself around the microphone and belts out the joyous, anthemic Rose, it's far from impossible to imagine entire arenas belting out the hookline, "I can hear my father talking saying, 'Rose, never learn to sing the blues' ".
Reassuringly, she has vulnerability too. She cannot pronounce the letter R properly and in the slight and unashamedly romantic Would You Marry Me? she might even have an out-of-context hit. Shining, an intricate saga of parental infidelity and separation, is more typical, but she never forgets where the melody is and it almost breaks into Sympathy for the Devil at its climax.
The closer Paper Hearts, a sad but defiant new song, a tale of "my gothic tendencies" and "throwing up on my dress", merges both feistiness and vulnerability, an ability she would do well to hone.
Backed by five men, three of whom are on loan from Alabama 3 and one who used to play with Wreckless Eric ("They bring some very average songs to life," she notes, disingenuously), Eileen Rose simply stands there and sings those splendid songs as if her life depended on them. In a sense it probably does.
