Tasmin Archer's debut, the eleven-song Great Expectations, is impressive. The album so seduces with its soaring pop sensibility that the impact of the subject matter – rape, depression, sexual abuse, among other topics – is at first elusive. Archer and her co-writers, guitarist John Hughes and keyboardist John Beck, are never sententious. Instead they strive for emotional immediacy in what could easily be standard "issue" songs. "Arienne," for example, is a brief but solid reassurance to a depressed friend or lover. Archer offers no therapy-speak platitudes, but the promise that she sings out so beautifully, "Arienne/I realise something's not in your favour/Arienne/I'll catch you when you fall," is far more honest and compelling.

And in "The Higher You Climb," a song about the surreal distance between individual people and the events of the world (there are oblique allusions to the various global civil wars, as well as to South Africa), Archer sings, to an upbeat tune, not about what "we" can do to make the world "better" but about actual, intimate, impossible rationalizations for remaining still: "I read the news today/A land was blown away/I understand it's out of my hands/But I would lay down my life for you/If you'd guarantee/That you and all your kind would not abuse it."

Archer's "Sleeping Satellite" was a huge hit in the U.K., and while it is a fine, rather bleak song (questioning space travel), others on the album, like the understated "Ripped Inside" (about rape), "In Your Care" (a potent vignette from the point of view of a sexually abused girl) and the weirdly ecstatic "Steeltown" ("Mere words of comfort have no meaning/For a dying town/That won't lie down"), have much more momentum. Archer, Hughes and Beck easily manage poignancy without sentimentality.

Only after successive listens to Great Expectations does the heart break, does anger rise. The set is a slow burn – Archer's sad, bold voice provoking never preaching. Already she has been compared to Joni Mitchell, Neneh Cherry and Sade. But she's actually more of a euphoric, less literal Tracy Chapman crossed with Archer's U.K. compatriot Everything but the Girl: ultrapop Brit soul with a folk consciousness. And the sublime ingredients are Archer's unselfconscious verbal-to-vocal and vocal-to-musical ironies – "serious" songs sung like love songs. The lovely, consistent incongruities of Great Expectations wreak havoc on the regimented mind and offer welcome, invigorating tonic to the unclenched one. (RS 659)

DANYEL SMITH