Beyoncé Knowles' third solo album has a pretty enticing pitch. Short enough to fit on one CD, it's nevertheless split over two. The second, ... Sasha Fierce, contains the usual pop-R&B, but the first is being sold as offering a rare insight into Knowles' real psyche: "I Am ... is about who I am underneath all the makeup, underneath the lights, underneath all the exciting star drama." It sounds intriguing. In interviews, Knowles is guarded to the point of banality. Were she any nicer, she'd have to dole out Gaviscon during interviews to stop journalists bringing up their lunch. Just occasionally, however, her music has given a glimpse of something rather more torrid, tough and interesting lurking behind the public image - not least Survivor, a good-riddance message to departed Destiny's Child members LaTavia Roberson and LeToya Luckett so livid that it occasioned a lawsuit from the duo.
Alas, there is nothing remotely like it on I Am ... Its currency is strictly self-help slowies that could have sprung from the dread pen of Linda Perry, purveyor of platitudinal power ballads to Pink. Everything here resembles something you might hear in the background when rejected X Factor contestants sob on Dermot O'Leary's shoulder, which seems appropriate, because as the realisation dawns that it's all going to sound like that, you feel ready to have a little cry yourself.
It's not just that the music on I Am ... is boring - although, aside from the growling guitars and tumbling drums of That's Why You're Beautiful, it is. It's that there is something underwhelming about the whole project. Last time around, on the sanitaryware-themed concept album B'Day, Knowles set Rodney Jerkins, Rich Harrison and Kasseem "Swizz Beatz" Dean to work in adjacent studios, effectively pitting three of the world's biggest urban producers against each other. Here, she seems to have picked collaborators on the basis of their startling names rather than their CVs. (In fairness, who wouldn't want to work with people called E Kidd Bogart, Hugo Chakrabongse and James Fauntleroy II?) The I Am ... team's past form includes songs for Leona Lewis, Natasha Bedingfield, James Blunt and Shayne Ward. One of them co-wrote Ian Brown's Dolphins Were Monkeys; another was the guitarist in EMF. It's hard not to wonder who she's going to team up with next. The bassist from the Seahorses? Dermo out of Northside?
You have to be impressed by the ruthlessness with which If I Were a Boy homes in on its target market: it does everything to get the recently chucked member of the girls'-night-out party standing on the pub table and singing tearfully along, short of spiking her Bacardi Breezer. Elsewhere, though, they've come up with stuff such as Halo, a pallid rewrite of Rihanna's Umbrella - same icy synths, same drivetime rock dynamic, same repetitive chorus - which certainly raises some questions: is this any way for the queen of R&B to be carrying on? Making do with a lesser artist's sloppy seconds? And is this really what lurks behind Beyoncé's flawless carapace - a burning desire to add to the global oversupply of MOR rock? A load of guff about how you can't live if you don't change and love can pass you by if you're busy making plans? Surely not.
Either way, when the carapace is reinstated on disc two, things get better. The handclap-assisted playground chant of opener Put a Ring On It is lent an improbable sense of threat by the doomy minor chords amassing behind it. It's really exciting, as is Hello, a ballad denied a place on I Am ... presumably on grounds of being insufficiently dreary. The 80s synthpop mode of Radio may be less suited to Knowles than the old soul samples that powered Crazy in Love and B'Day's Suga Mama, and underlined the link between her vocal style and the visceral female singers of the 60s, but there's no denying it's an irresistible pop song.
Not everything on ... Sasha Fierce works. The sonic trickery on the most experimental track, Diva, isn't interesting enough to distract you from the absence of a tune. Almost equally weird, but much better, is Video Phone, which introduces us to the unlikely figure of Beyoncé Knowles, amateur pornographer: "You want me naked? If you like this position you can tape it." She doesn't make for the world's most believable Reader's Wife, but it doesn't matter, because the spare, eerie backdrop of groans and echoing electronics is so thrilling. There's a lesson in there you wish she had heeded while making the ostensibly soul-baring I Am ...: in pop, honesty isn't always the best policy.