Battlefield

Performer: Jordin Sparks
Distributor: Sony Music Distribution (

Notes: Jordin Sparks didn't get any traction until she received a boost from Chris Brown via their duet "No Air," the one moment on her 2007 eponymous debut that felt unquestionably modern, so it makes perfect sense that her second album, BATTLEFIELD, ditches almost all lingering American Idol pageantry for stylized pop and R&B pitched halfway between Rihanna (whose "S.O.S." is rewritten here, with Shannon's "Let the Music Play" substituted for "Tainted Love") and Leona Lewis. Here, she hires some of 2009's biggest hitmakers, including T-Pain and OneRepublic's Ryan Tedder. Most of these namebrands are recordmakers, not songwriters, so it's not a great surprise to find BATTLFIELD bears a slick production that's almost all treble, bass and rhythmic hooks. This doesn't apply quite as strongly to the clutch of Sparks' collaborations grouped toward the end of the album--all ballads, some with vaguely spiritual overtones such as "Faith,"--but for the first two-thirds of Battlefield, it's all a cool calculated assault where Jordin seems almost incidental to the creation of the sound. Because the sound is of paramount importance, this does succeed as pure radio-ready product, which is enough for Sparks to sustain her momentum if not enough to give her some kind of identity to build a career upon.

Entertainment Weekly - "BATTLEFIELD certainly delivers on the artistic end....[The album] actually contains enough potential hits to keep the singer in heavy rotation well into IDOL's tenth season..." -- Grade: A- Billboard (p.28) - "Dr. Luke and T-Pain lend their touch to 'Watch You Go,' on which Sparks proves she can straddle pop and R&B, while also evoking the synergy between joy and pain."

A promising young Arizona-based vocalist who entered a number of singing contests in her early teens, Jordin Sparks finally got her big break when she won the sixth season of AMERICAN IDOL in 2007 at the tender age of 17. Despite her strong religious faith, the amiable performer opted not to go the CCM route on her self-titled debut, instead offering up a highly accessible--and largely secular--R&B/pop album that reached the upper tiers of the Billboard charts.

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