Neptune City is very nearly that bad. Warbling like a radio with dodgy batteries, or vinyl that's warped in the sun, over dull and unoriginal country ballads that are as forgettable as they are non-descript, this really is an album that's going nowhere.

Nicole Atkins sounded so promising before she actually opened her mouth. The nicely psychedelic sleeve winks that she might be a bit Janis Joplin, her biography involves Haight Ashbury and she's produced by The Cardigans' Tore Johansson, but from there it goes downhill faster than a San Francisco tram with its brake cable severed. If only someone would do the same to her vocal cords.

Neptune City manages to be so wrong in so many ways. Not quirky enough to push the alt.folk buttons, not slick enough to appeal to the Shania Twain and Alanis Morrisette crowd, not pained enough to recall the best of the Patsy Clines and Loretta Lynns her press release tries to namecheck, you can't help wondering whether this a record produced by committee.

In fact, to a large extent it comes across as the aural equivalent of one of those mobile phone ads you get in cinemas before the movie starts: a table full of clueless major label execs feeling smug that it's a 'little bit Sandi Thom here, a little bit Karen Carpenter there' while falling far, far short of being worthy of the comparisons with Julee Cruise it's so desperately clawing for.

There's a shouty bit on Brookyln's On Fire that goes all Avril Lavigne for a while, if your geography teacher decided to do Avril Lavigne for the end-of-term Stars In Their Eyes show, and then she goes for breaking high notes on Kill The Headlights. It's not fragile or haunting though, no more than she manages dark and brooding elsewhere.

The first record Nicole Atkins bought was Traffic's John Barleycorn Must Die. She cites everyone from Johnny Cash, The Ronettes, Robert Plant, David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti as influences, which makes you wonder how she could possibly have gone so wrong. Don't bother to find out for yourself.

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Mercury Prize 2009 nominees