Jewel: Spirit

Jewel Kilcher may just be the easiest target in pop music right now: A dewy-eyed, lip-glossed purveyor of poetry and platitudes, she plays folk-pop music with a lethal combination of bloodlessness and comically earnest angst. Her songs rarely run deeper than how you should be yourself and follow your heart, how we're nothing without love, how hatred is bad, how she needs to fly, and how everything's gonna be okay. Each time Kilcher delivers certain phrases—the "boop-boop-bee-doo, yeah" at the beginning of "Down So Long," or just about any time she enunciates the word "heart"—it's the vocal equivalent of a quart of sap. She even wrote a best-selling book of poetry, A Night Without Armor, in which she hails the work of "Bukowsky." That said, her second album, Spirit, is usually too limp to be particularly painful; there are fewer immediate hooks than on her best-selling Pieces Of You, but hardcore fans likely won't be disappointed with the vocal acrobatics of "Deep Water" and "Enter From The East," or the schmaltzy hit single "Hands," or the ploddingly stark album-closer "Absence Of Fear," or "Down So Long" and "Do You," both of which find Kilcher approximating grit. Cynics should run and hide, of course, but those looking for Kilcher's very special brand of wispy, narcissistic, fragile-songbird balladry are all set. The superficially uplifting "Life Uncommon" alone contains enough insufferable inspirational observations for a Successories warehouse, with room left over for 20 seasons of Felicity.