Veiled, Leah Andreone (RCA)
By Chuck Campbell

Alanis Morissette fans impatient for the follow-up to Jagged Little Pill might be tempted to turn to Leah Andreone's Veiled for a quick fix.

Like Morissette, the 23-year-old San Diego native is an emotional philosopher who's pent up with hostility, but banking on hope.

Unlike Jagged Little Pill, however, Veiled is flat.

Andreone indulges her nasal voice in fits similar to Morissette's, but her stunts seem more shrewdly calculated than charmingly eccentric.

Meanwhile, the instrumentation is only dressed-up folk music -- and average folk music at that.

When she ditches her grating intonation, Andreone can be quite the songbird (as on "Mother Tongue" and "Imagining You"). But she can't stop trumping up her role as damsel.

She lays it on thick on "Problem Child," for instance, singing to unresponsive parents, "Why won't you pay attention/Hung from a rope, then you'll know me." And if she isn't threatening suicide, she's nagging a lover to go ahead and leave her on "Kiss Me Goodbye" (presumably she's too weak to take an active role in her relationships) or otherwise pining away in self-pity.

This isn't a terrible album; Andreone's lyrics are as amusing as decent high-school poetry, and her presentation is incomplete, not slipshod.

But Veiled isn't quite the breakthrough like those recently released by Jewel and Tracy Bonham. And Andreone simply doesn't touch Morissette.

Rating: ** (of 5)

Chuck Campbell writes about popular music at The Knoxville News-Sentinel in Tennessee.