What about this Nadine Coyle album then?

Published Sep 7 2010, 09:00 BST  |  By Nick Levine

It feels as if it's taken longer to arrive than a package from Amazon Antarctica, but The Nadine Coyle album is finally on its way and, having fully abused the five-track sampler over the weekend, we're happy to confirm that, yes indeed, it's time to get excited.

As those of you who've heard the clip on the Nadtastic one's website will know, the lead single and title track - 'Insatiable', details fans - is a bombastic synthy pop morsel with more swagger than the hardest lad in the upper sixth. However, to our ears it's trumped by 'Red Light', an Annie Lennox-goes-electro-glam stomper on which Nadine seems to be obsessing over a band's star axesmith - appropriately enough, the track concludes with a widdly-widdly 40-second guitar solo that Slash himself wouldn't raise his eyebrows at. (Not that you'd be able to see behind the shades, of course.)

What's more, as any self-respecting Girls Aloud fan will tell you, Nads can slow it down as well as throw it down. 'Chained' is a suitably contemporary-sounding pop-R&B toe-tapper built around a plinky-plonky synth riff not dissimilar to the one at the start of Whitney's 'My Love Is Your Love', 'Natural' is a slinky little number that Louise would have done the business with back in the day - and yes, we do mean that as a compliment - and 'Unbroken' is a soulful, smouldering, five-minute-long ballad on which La Coyle shows off a near-operatic falsetto. We should probably mention at this point that her vocals on all five tracks are pretty bloody good.

See, we told you it was time to get excited, didn't we?