Dueling divas

The Stone guide doesn't say exactly what the Chapman fan will glean from listening to early Armatrading, but one suspects it's something along the lines of an appreciation of showmanship. Armatrading has never had qualms about putting a song across, pleasing her audiences. Chapman has tended to stay at the more stately remove of one carrying her share of the folkie burden.

On What's Inside, Armatrading's willingness now sounds like eagerness. Her lyrics are simplicity itself, rather plain when taken out of context (so naturally there's a lyric sheet, with every "hmmmm" and "oooh-ooh," and "da-da-da" dumbly transcribed), and her melodies are modestly hooky, but the arrangements here are out of control. They keep shifting around, as though we needed to be coaxed and pampered. Strings are the main offenders. Whether pizzicato (which should be banned) or sawing away with mellifluous intent, the damn things keep reappearing. Supposedly the Kronos Quartet guests at one point, but I keep missing it in all the business.

Aside from strings, it's high-proficiency Adult Contempo, all the components polished and pressed into place - which only underlines the point that Armatrading isn't a polished pop singer. Her voice has an almost gravelly dramatic quality that she underplays. When she sings "Obituary columns are filled with love/Don't wait until it's over" (on "Shapes And Sizes"), you think "nice groove," despite the criminal violins. She's determined to make this a feelgood disc. And she does.

Chapman offers a more solemn optimism. Her songs divide into the personal and the standard utopian; the latter seem more inherited than heartfelt, the traditional touchstone of the folkish singer-songwriter of substance. And so the album opens with the one-two punch of "Heaven's Here on Earth" and "New Beginning," teeth-achingly inane examples of pop humanist folderol. Although those songs offer enough ear candy - bopping along nicely, rhythm section seemingly awake - one wonders whether the disc will ever recover.

It does, but just barely. We still have to face "The Rape of the World." Hey, listen, I recycle. I give money to Greenpeace. I even donate to Dare, now and then. But taking a stand against strip mining will never make a successful leap from pamphlet to musical idea. Mother Earth is a halfassed and soggy metaphor that should go the way of pizzicato strings. And "Tell It Like It Is" is reminiscent of a ditty I heard as a child called "Do a Duet," where two people sang, "We're going to do a duet" over and over again - and when it's over, you think, well they did but they didn't. So Chapman goes on speaking frankly about the "horrors of the world" without ever doing so. "Say it, say it, say it," she sings. And I think, okay, but you go first.

The personal stuff is better. Here, her low-key delivery serves as an anti-cloying device. "The Promise" could have been treacle, and "Remember the Tin Man" - well, consider the title - but these come across unsticky because of Chapman's natural forlorn quality, which at crucial moments of sentiment shades into a sort of bruised dignity. "Cold Feet," about a young man's fatal rite of passage, has a hoary mutable metaphor device that works much better than it should - again because of her unforced solemnity.

The instrumentation and arrangements here are far from austere, though next to Armatrading Chapman seems positively demure. What these two women really have in common is the way the moods of their latest discs seem to ignore the gloomier aspects of their vocal ranges: one by being determinedly happy, the other by being implacably naive. I'd go with happy even though it's probably the more calculated of the two. But what the hell, that's showmanship for you.