The Storm Inside

by

Laura Michelle Kelly

Edit

This is the most disappointing album I've heard since Sarah Brightman's "Dive".

I was so blown away by Kelly's winning performance in the first contest to recognize up and coming West End artists, in 2000, recently (re)broadcast on the Ovation channel, a decade later, that I immediately went to see what I could find of her voice on disk.

What I found was this lone album recorded about halfway between then and now. Upon receiving and listening today, I found mostly unfamiliar material, despite several familiar titles in the track listing (unavailable for preview). Titles I thought I knew are either not the same songs, or the arrangements are so strange as to make them unrecognizable. One song I did recognize was the Four Tops' "Reach Out", but the arrangement was what I'd call big band pop, like one might have heard on a LuLu album from the 1960s.

Maybe this album will grow on me, but will somebody please notify me when Kelly records an album full of hit show tunes with fairly standard arrangements, like those in her "audition"?