Being a pop star - how hard can it be? C'mon... it's a TV appearance here, a famous boyfriend there. Sure you can no longer eat, or have a private life. Oh, and one more thing, you must create songs to make the kids either fill dance floors with their fabulous backsides or sway slowly along to at school discos.

"Geri should stop worrying about being taken seriously as a musician, and just take great pleasure in giving us what she does best"

Cue everyone's favorite pop tartini Geri, with her fit, fantastic body, soul-searching interviews and famous best friends. Yes, she no longer wickedly fills out a Union Jack mini-dress, but she still has apple cheeks and a cherry tomato nose. And she still knows how to make a pop album.

Ms G co-wrote all 12 tracks and serves as the executive producer on her latest offering. Riding high on the Number One smash 'It's Raining Men' (a note-for-note cover of The Weather Girls' roller boogie classic), it should be smooth chart sailing for 'Scream If You Want To Go Faster'.

Not a cohesive body of work, it scampers (quite sweetly) all over the joint. A key of icons (a heart 'for the heart', lips for 'sexy') is included in the liner notes to help the listener understand what the hardly Shakespearian lyrics are trying to say.

Surprisingly, it's when Geri hangs up her dancing shoes that the album really sparkles. 'Calling' is a bossa nova flecked ballad celebrating the to-ing and fro-ing game that new lovers play. While it won't make Astrud Gilberto worry, it shines with sun-streaked melodies and bright vocals.

Tingly guitars, a Bacharach-like singing style and trumpet lilts makes 'Circles Round The Moon' lift right off the player and twirl around the room. The chorus of 'Love Is The Only Light' is a textbook example of faultless pop structure. Vocals rise and fall in perfect harmony with the refrain, resulting in smiles all around.

'Strength Of A Woman' is a chirpy ditty about how women should seek empowerment within themselves, and not through blokes. Nice sentiment, but it is hard to swallow when the woman saying it has transformed herself into what society determines as attractive through slavish devotion to exercise and diet.

Those tracks tagged with a rollerblade icon (meaning 'to make you move') are dance by numbers and just blend into one another, with the slight exception of the whirling mirrorball groover 'Shake Your Bootie Cutie'.

Lyrics are not the strong point of this new baby. Most of them are worthy of the doodles on a teenage girl's notebook, complete with puffy hearts dotting the i's. Geri should stop worrying about being taken seriously as a musician, and just take great pleasure in giving us what she does best -brightly coloured sweeties to make both your teeth and heart ache. A considerable part of the enjoyment of the album is gained from knowing Geri is out there doing her thing, not caring that she wears her emotions on her sleeve.

'Scream If You Want To Go Faster' is never going to be a seminal album to change your life and return to again and again. But it is an album you can happily bop along to and sing along with at the top of your lungs during a drunken night out. You can't really ask more of a pop album than that.


Lisa Oliver