X Factor face off!

For some unexplainable reason I watched almost the entire season of the X-Factor, I’m not sure why, I just got sucked in by all the bright lights, freaks, Louis Walsh’s changing hair colour and the desperation in peoples fame hungry eyes. Luckily for me, that was the first and last time it got me.

However, it did introduce me to one Rebecca Ferguson, the only redeemable factor of the X-Factor. Her unusual, haunting voice has the ability to make a grown man weep. Several times when watching her performances I had ‘something in my eye’.

Naturally, her pure, raw talent wasn’t enough to win the show due to the majority of people watching the show being screaming, impressionable girls who voted for Matt Cardle, who to give him some credit has got a unique voice.

As is tradition with the show, it’s always the winner that comes out worse, often being forced to release some limp, insipid covers album just before Christmas ready for your mum’s stocking. The runners up tend to release the best material, and so it show’s in Rebecca Ferguson’s debut album, Heaven.

I wouldn’t normally go out and buy an album by someone who appeared on a ‘talent’ show, but such was the power of her voice, I felt that I had to. The fact that she also told Simon Cowell that she would be recording her own material or nothing at all made me take even more notice.

Not shackled to the demands of hastily producing an album, she has produced a rich and soulful record. One of the stand out tracks on the album, Glitter and Gold is filled with 1970s attitude and swagger, with a great horn section and Ferguson completely smashing the lyrics, going from whisper to full throttle. At the other end of the spectrum, Shoulder to Shoulder shows the delicate side of her voice.

This is a great first album, soulful and epic (check out the brass on some of the tracks, proper big band stuff) and is a good antidote to the monstrously overplayed Adele. So, the X Factor has found us a star after all.

As a footnote, it would be rude of me not to mention Matt Cardle’s album. I have been privy to a listen and the result is, well, predictable from an X Factor winner. It’s an album full of ballads and key changes. That’s not too say it’s bad, it’s a marked improvement on the dross that tends to come from an X Factor winner, but you feel that the chap would be much better off fronting a rock band, like he did with his old band Seven Summers which were pretty good.

The album has its moments, but falls down on a couple of weepy ballads and at times sounds like something ColdPlay or James Morrison should be singing. There’s no getting away from the fact that he has a unique voice, it’s just the material that lets him down. Go on Matt, get back in front of a band, one James Morrison is enough.

Oh and it includes that horrendous key changing cover of the Biffy Clyro song.