Album: Shakira

Laundry Service, Epic

Shakira is the latest Latin-pop phenomenon to conquer America, a 24-year-old Colombian singer-songwriter of Lebanese-Colombian ancestry whose style reflects a wider range of influences than the routine Latin, R&B and pop veins mined by contemporaries such as Gloria, J-Lo and Christina.

Having already chalked up 8 million sales and two Grammys for her two previous albums(and received glowing testimonials from her compatriot the Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez), Shakira has put her career into overdrive following her management hook-up with former Madonna and Michael Jackson manager Freddie DeMann. Indeed, only established industry colossi Garth Brooks and Britney could prevent Laundry Service entering the US album charts at No 1, and it doesn't take the shrewdest industry analyst to predict that it might well end the year as the biggest-selling album of 2002, so assuredly does Shakira transcend global musical boundaries.

Her pan-cultural appeal is most immediately apparent in the opening two tracks, which mingle apparently contradictory influences with wit and panache. "Objection" is a tango-rocker on which the fast-riffing accordion is augmented by rockabilly guitar licks, ending up bizarrely reminiscent of The B-52s, while "Underneath Your Clothes" sounds uncannily like Celine Dion singing a country love song, as if produced by George Martin in his Beatles pomp. Elsewhere, the Arabic stomper "Eyes Like Yours" draws on her Middle Eastern background, with its darabuka, oud and dervish swirls of accordion. You're most likely to have heard Shakira, though, on her current massive hit single "Whenever, Wherever", which is rather more reflective of her Latin roots through the tootling pan-pipes and the frisky cumbia shuffle animating the groove.

It's also the most intriguing of her forays into the English language, sprouting odd prepositional phrases along the lines of "thereover, hereunder" alongside topographical lines such as "Baby, I would climb the Andes solely/ To count the freckles on your body" and "Lucky that my breasts are small and humble/ So you don't confuse them with mountains." But for all her assurances of devotion, there's a grim determination about this track that's slightly menacing, suggesting that any poor soul caught beneath the wheels of Shakira's ambition would be mangled without a second thought – a characteristic common to many who've obsessively sought celebrity since childhood. Confirmation comes in the laboured anti-drug song "Poem to a Horse", in which the drug-taker is criticised not so much for his addiction as for his lack of materialist ambition, which is hardly the most spiritually advanced attitude to bring to the narcotics issue.

On the downside, substantial tranches of Laundry Service are no more than adequate: the bouncy Euro-pop of "Te Dejo Madrid", the overblown orchestral grandiosity of "The One" and the insipid pop of "Rules" are all less than sparkling, while the pumping house-pop of "Ready for the Good Times" is in desperate need of a decent remix. And there's a limit to how much one can take of Shakira's little throaty hiccup gimmick.