FAVORITE ALBUM #4

#4 RACHEL STEVENS / COME AND GET IT [taste] [buy]

key tracks: some girls / negotiate with love / nothing good about this goodbye / i said never again [but here we are] / dumb dumb / i will be there / so good

ok, ok. i know this album came out in 2005, but i didn't hear it until 2007, so it qualifies. so there.

i'll always remember the summer of 2007 as my rachel stevens summer. i knew of her [she used to be part of uk boy/girl band s club 7], but i had no idea she'd released two solo albums after striking it out on her own. one day my friend in london sendspaced me the album. i dropped it into itunes, hit play, and immediately wondered, 'how is this woman not an international superstar??' she has the songs and the looks. my only guess was that the UK record-buying public, fairly or unfairly, had a beef with her. alls i got to say is i certainly have no beef with her!

over the next few weeks i slipped further and further into fantasyland and tried to track down her address, phone number...er, i bought both of her albums [they aren't available domestically, but you can buy them used off on amazon on the cheap]. if you know me, you know i tend to go a little overboard on the things i love. some might call it neurotic, i call it extremely passionate. but we're getting into semantics, here....

the transition from throw-away pop starlet to respected pop starlet can't be easy. very few actually make the transition. the only one that immediately comes to mind if kylie minogue although i supposed you could make a case for mandy moore]. so when rachel made the leap, she and her peeps were smart to enlist the services of richard x in the production booth. the result was an album of perfectly executed pop songs. and 'perfectly' is by no means hyperbole. they are perfect. they are so good, in fact, that it plays like a greatest hits rather than a studio album. the first track, 'so good,' establishes the blueprint for the rest of the album--a relentless onslaught of hi-nrg, three-and-a-half minute pop gems. of the thirteen tracks presented on 'come and get it,' on the two miss the mark ['all about me' and 'secret garden']. but even then 'come and get it' is an example of what mature, adult pop should sound like. kudos to everyone involved. her american counterparts would do well to take note, for rachel stevens is no pop princess--she's the queen.