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"You&amp;#039;ve got to feel for Leona Lewis. The timid north London girl carries not only the weight of the nation&amp;#039;s expectations on her slender shoulders, but also the future of The X Factor&amp;#039;s credibility as a star-making vehicle. After cocking up royally with Steve Brookstein, and managing to propel Shayne Ward towards sales figures most accurately described as &amp;quot;bleh&amp;quot;, nobody&amp;#039;s taking any chances this time around. Simon Cowell recently dubbed Lewis &amp;quot;one of the most important artists in the world&amp;quot;; she&amp;#039;s been allowed eleven months to ready her debut album - Ward barely got four - and Spirit&amp;#039;s production budget is probably big enough to settle Heather Mills&amp;#039; outstanding legal bills: Dallas Austin (Madonna, TLC, Sugababes), Walter Afanasieff (Mariah Carey, Celine Dion) and Timbaland prot\u00C3\u00A9g\u00C3\u00A9 Ryan Tedder have all strained their knob-twiddling fingers to make sure this disc&amp;#039;s a winner. Impressively, Spirit&amp;#039;s A-list production team has prevented Lewis - a singer whose swooping, octave-conquering voice really belongs in the diva-dominated early nineties \u00E2\u20AC\u201C from sounding too fusty or old-fashioned. Tedder, the producer and co-writer of the album&amp;#039;s trailer single, &amp;#039;Bleeding Love&amp;#039;, recently noted that &amp;quot;if you&amp;#039;re going to push that kind of music [these days] - big ballads and big songs - you have to be edgier; they can&amp;#039;t be clean and polished.&amp;quot; To that end, he tempers &amp;#039;Bleeding&amp;#039;s lovelorn balladry with the sort of beefy, hard-edged beats you&amp;#039;d normally find on a Timbaland track, and gives Lewis an unexpected urban edge on &amp;#039;Take A Bow&amp;#039;. Even the chipper gospel-pop of &amp;#039;Whatever It Takes&amp;#039; is anchored by a rhythm track that wouldn&amp;#039;t shame a boy-racer cruising through Harlem in his pimped-up ride. Just as surprisngly, Spirit finds Lewis wallowing in darker lyrical territory than her wholesome image would suggest. &amp;#039;Bleeding Love&amp;#039; is surely the first talent show single to feature a possible reference to self-harm \u00E2\u20AC\u201C either way, &amp;quot;My heart&amp;#039;s crippled by the vein that I keep on closing&amp;quot; is a million miles away from the banal platitudes of &amp;#039;A Moment Like This&amp;#039;, Lewis&amp;#039; X Factor victory song that&amp;#039;s tacked on here as a &amp;#039;UK bonus track&amp;#039;. &amp;#039;Better In Time&amp;#039; and &amp;#039;Take A Bow&amp;#039; deal with failed romances in admirably stark terms, while &amp;#039;Homeless&amp;#039;, a power ballad that compares the end of a relationship to a life of queueing outside inner city soup kitchens, is almost unbearably bleak. &amp;quot;In this cold I&amp;#039;m walking aimless, feeling helpless,&amp;quot; Lewis warbles in a tour de force of despair and misery. Spirit isn&amp;#039;t entirely without fault. Over 14 songs and 57 minutes, there&amp;#039;s a dearth of uptempo moments \u00E2\u20AC\u201C only &amp;#039;Whatever It Takes&amp;#039; and the sassy &amp;#039;Best You Never Had&amp;#039; really require Lewis to get her toes tapping \u00E2\u20AC\u201C and, at times, Lewis apes her heroes a little too closely. The overwrought &amp;#039;Here I Am&amp;#039; could have come straight from The Bodyguard soundtrack, while the histrionic finale of &amp;#039;Footprints In The Sand&amp;#039; seems hellbent on revisiting Mariah Carey&amp;#039;s schlock-pop masterwork &amp;#039;Anytime You Need A Friend&amp;#039;. Tellingly, it&amp;#039;s already taken &amp;#039;Friend&amp;#039;s place on those jubilant X Factor montage scenes that tend to round off an especially emotional audition episode. However, even Spirit&amp;#039;s weaker moments are saved by Lewis, whose performances are technically brilliant, filled with emotion and never over-egged. Not that she&amp;#039;s a slacker in the vocal showboating stakes, mind \u00E2\u20AC\u201C the 12-second &amp;quot;eeeeeeyeeaayaaaaay&amp;quot; that jump-starts the crescendo of &amp;#039;Homeless&amp;#039; is one of the most dazzling pop moments of the year. At this stage in the game, it&amp;#039;s inadvisable \u00E2\u20AC\u201C inexcusable even - to heap any more praise on Simon Cowell&amp;#039;s planet-sized ego, but it&amp;#039;s even more foolish to deny the truth: The X Factor just created its first superstar.   [The &amp;#039;Deluxe Edition&amp;#039;, released a year and five days after the original, adds three new songs to the initial tracklisting. &amp;#039;Misses Glass&amp;#039; and the Akon-penned &amp;#039;Forgive Me&amp;#039; first appeared on the US version of Spirit, but both are trumped by &amp;#039;Run&amp;#039;, a Snow Patrol cover that really is worthy of the adjective &amp;quot;spine-tingling&amp;quot;.  The &amp;#039;Deluxe Edition&amp;#039; also includes a DVD of the Spirit campaign, the best of which, &amp;#039;Forgive Me&amp;#039;, finds Lewis looking ever so slightly uncomfortable.] "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/music/album-reviews/review/a79709/leona-lewis-spirit/>