12/13/2012 - British actress/singer Faith is a work in progress, capable of karaoke-ing Joss Stone, Kate Havnevik and Gwen Stefani at will and not yet fully formed as to her own style. In the ballad “Just Be” she adds a Nelly Furtado angle to her inflections, and opener “Picking Up the Pieces” suggests an Adele rock-out, and that’s nice. But the direction of the LP is fuzzily focused, resulting in a few issues: obvious Joss Stone-competitor “Beauty of the End” will be thought a misstep by some ears, since it could be argued that her screamy yodeling sounds off-key (it isn’t), but my only real quibble is with “Agony,” which, first of all, shouldn’t have come after “When You’re Gone,” since that’s two seriously bummer tunes in a row, but the real problem is the hook, a dumb-brained ripoff of Killers’ “Mr. Brightside.”  The filler is decent, such as “Blood Sweat & Tears”’s horse-gallop dance beat.

Grade: B+