Vanessa Carlton: Be Not Nobody : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Recently, Madonna-spawned pop starlets with names like Britney and Mandy have overshadowed the trickle of young female musicians derived from the thornier stock of Tori, Ani, Alanis and Fiona. Twenty-one-year-old Vanessa Carlton, an ex-ballerina turned singer-songwriter, is self-consciously a part of that trickle (although she has a pouty schoolgirl thing going on that would make Britney proud). Carlton's classical-piano training girds her angst-ridden songs, which are full of tortured boys and the long-suffering girls who love them, and the musicianship on Be Not Nobody is impeccable. But it's all in the service of overwrought victim-of-love material that's been done to death, and for all her vocal affectation -- think a prettied-up version of Morissette's hiccups and yelps, coupled with Tori Amos' phrasing -- the album never really jells into more than a retread of her predecessors' songbooks. But where Alanis, Tori and Fiona can be both heartbreakingly vulnerable and stunningly vicious in their pain, Carlton -- although clearly talented -- seems to be playing dress-up in their emotions and themes.

ERNEST HARDY
(RS 898 - June 20, 2002)