What on earth has happened to Jewel Kilcher? A couple of years ago the Alaskan pin-up was every inch the stereotypical folkie, an earnest earth mother with an acoustic guitar in one hard and a book of poetry in the other. Now, as the pink mini-skirts and raunchy disco singles suggest, she's gone pop - and the results are an awful lot better than you might expect. The R'n'B hooks are sprightly, her voice is coolly seductive and the lyrics, while not exactly profound, are at least a cut above the likes of Avril Lavigne or Michelle Branch. The purists, of course, will be outraged by Jewel's breathtakingly cynical re-invention. But the more you listen to the cheap pop thrills of 0304, the more you realise that the thinking man's Britney is not such a bad thing to be.
