Tina Turner Wildest Dreams Parlophone CDEST 2279

I suppose this, Tina Turner's first new album release since her big biopic blitz in 1993 - and her first album of all-new material since 1989's Foreign Affair - could be a mite more predictable, but only just. Helmed by Trevor Horn, it offers mostly neat and tidy renditions of songs tailored to fit her needs so tightly there's little room left to breathe, let alone do her strange funky-chicken dance.

The album opens confidently with the bubbling clavinet funk-rock of "Do What You Do", before slipping, pregnant with understated erotic promise, into "Whatever You Want". The promise lasts all of a minute, as the track mutates into a ghastly Wagnerian thing of thunderous aspect. An overwrought cover of John Waite's "Missing You" follows in like vein, and it's a long hard road back from that point, full of bluster like Sheryl Crow's anthemic "All Kinds Of People" and a version of Massive Attack's "Unfinished Sympathy" that compares poorly to Shara Nelson's more subtly impassioned singing on the original.

The celebrity support network is worked to variable effect throughout. Bono & Edge's "Goldeneye" is a decent simulacrum of the Bond-theme style, but "Confidential" has to be one of The Pet Shop Boys' least remarkable compositions.