After two years of waiting, many a fan of Lady Sovereign’s ladette style and catchy tunes would have high hopes for her second release entitled Jigsaw, including me. I want to like this album. I want to like it so much that I listened to it eight times over two days in the hope that it would grow on me. The theory did work across half of the album, but as for the rest, her normally cute semi-grasp of the English language makes you want to slap her on the wrist in grammatical correction. If that doesn’t get you, the complaint-themed “life is so tough for this little white ghetto girl” lyrics will.

The album doesn’t follow a genre, which is refreshing. Kicking off with an addictive electro-pop tune with a few funny lines, the mix of pop, hip hop, electronic and ballad is quite fun. So Human and I Got You Dancing, the two released tracks from Jigsaw, along with Let’s Be Mates and only a handful of the more catchy songs make up half of the short album. The other half gets filed under ‘mediocre’, perhaps put down to trying too hard to please everyone between the ages of 12 and 25 with her big comeback release.

To back-up a multi-genre album you have to have talents other than in spoken word. The slower, ordinary tracks highlight the fact that Miss. Sov, although a damn fine rapper, can’t carry a tune. This sort of scenario would normally require a singer to make up for ho-hum compositions by killing it with an amazing voice. She calls it “a more developed style of songwriting; another chapter to my life.” The poor girl obviously means well, but instead has recorded a bunch of shit songs. Thankfully, the tracks that are more her old style make up for them. So no, she can’t dance and she really can’t sing… she can only do one thing, and that’s be Lady Sovereign.

Pick up the album if you are a fan, you’ll enjoy most of it. If you’re not a fan, stay away. You’ll spend the whole time wondering who let her graduate grade six English.