The singer-songwriter Paula Cole says that appearing nude on the cover of her new album is "an artistic statement". It's a gratuitous gesture, because the songs themselves probably reveal as much as we need to know about Ms Cole. Where Have All The Cowboys Gone? was the hit, but it's confessional cuts such as Tiger which strip the woman bare, both lyrically and in terms of a jazz-influenced voice that may remind many of Yoko Ono in a primal scream mode. Or Joni Mitchell before she realised that you don't need to scrape the sky, vocally, to make a point. Nevertheless, songs such as Nietzche's Eyes compare - favourably - with the best of Mitchell's lyrics, and Mississippi shows why Cole was chosen to replace Sinead O' Connor on Peter Gabriel's 1995 world tour.