Review: Kelly Clarkson - "All I Ever Wanted" DELUXE EDITON

I've had the new Kelly Clarkson album for several days. I haven't had time to blog about it since I've been really sick all week. Which is just as well, as my feelings have changed drastically since the first listen.

I listened to All I Ever Wanted the whole way through on Wednesday in my car, where my CDs spend the early days of their lives, and I was not impressed. To be honest, I hated it. It sounded disjointed, my mind raced to compare it to the superior My December,and All I Ever Wanted comes up quite short in that comparison. The ballads "If No One Will Listen" and "Cry" are quite boring, nothing like Kelly's masterpieces "Because Of You" and "Irvine." There doesn't seem to be the instantly catchy singles like Breakaway, but there was a song or two that I wanted to hear again, so I kept the album in rotation. I still don't think it's a perfect album, but it has flashes of brilliance. Like the opening verse of "Long Shot" - a mashup of classical movements and electric guitars. Or the ballsy punk track "Whyyouwannabringmedown" which is completely out of place on this album but is still an incredibly fun song sung with buckets of sass. And the Duffy-esque "I Want You" also appears to have crawled off another, more interesting album. But of the songs that were hand-picked to be singles, opener "My Life Would Suck Without You" is the obvious best, the title track is also slinky funk-pop jam with radio written all over it. The two bonus tracks on the Deluxe edition are probably better rock/pop hybrid songs than the singles front loaded on the album, swap out "Tip Of My Tongue" for "I Do Not Hook Up" and you've got a better shaped disc.

But the centerpiece of the album are the songs Kelly co-wrote with One Republic front man Ryan Tedder, the beautifully drum-heavy "Already Gone" (which reminds me of Ryan's single for Beyonce "Halo") and the rapid-fire new wave jams "If I Can't Have You" and "Impossible" - proof that if Kelly had the right producer/co-writer team she could have written a whole album herself and made it both commercial viable and artistically cohesive.

In the end, Kelly can sing anything and make it awesome. Luckily some of the material provided for her on All I Ever Wanted is worthy of her.