Watch out Celine, here comes the new princess of wails. The debut album from the latest X Factor winner is another callous exercise in overblown sentimentality. Every phrase is gaudily embellished, every note loudly bellowed, every song bludgeoned by strings and choirs to render genuine feeling in the lyrics utterly meaningless.
The heavy-handed production treats listeners like idiots unable to work out an emotional response to music for themselves. It's the audio equivalent of a televised interview about how a certain song was sung at a relative's funeral.
We have here, effectively, a series of big-budget covers (Jennifer Rush, Shania Twain, Supertramp, Demi Lovato) that includes a couple of duets with Nicole Scherzinger and Michael Bolton for commercial security. The sole new song, Treasure, is such a studied piece of market-research copycat writing it doesn't merit the epithet "original".
Shows like The X Factor have given us notable pop stars in Olly Murs, One Direction and Leona Lewis, but an album like The Power Of Love is just take, take, take: it leeches the talent of others and gives nothing - absolutely nothing - to the music world in return. There's no question Bailey can sing - she won the thing, after all - but sing only in that milk-the-moment, hammer-it-home X Factor style.
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