Beautiful Lonely begins with a bit of a stumble. The first song, In Common, is a decent pop number with a lot of bounce showing her ability to appeal to a mainstream audience. But the following song, Brother, is unbalanced. The lyrics and music are rhythmically out of sync. Courtney sounds like she is reading the first draft of a poem over a random piece of dramatic instrumentation.

This leads us to the third track, Part I Like, which takes the Lisa Loeb influences and turns up the cute factor to an intolerable degree. The lyrics about love coupled with distance are interesting but the delivery causes the uncontrollable desire to press the skip button to the next track. Due to its lyrics, the song may appeal to religious teenage girls, but the rest of the population will most likely discard it as fluff.

By the fourth song, Stories, the CD starts to find its groove. Courtney’s gentle voice takes on gritty material and instrumentation that carries weight. This continues in the same vein with the following song, Hurt a Girl. With these two songs, her similarities to Natalie Merchant become apparent. Courtney Yasmineh sounds most beautiful when she surrounds herself with darkness. Because her voice has a fragility to it, the lighter songs on the album seem flighty and are hard to take seriously. But the darker songs, like these two, give the listener empathy for Courtney because her voice feels fragile. In a shadowy context, Courtney can shine.

The next few songs, including the title track, are nothing compared to the nineth track on the album. Luna Moth has the most interesting lyrics and provides the best balance musically for Courtney’s voice. This song is ready for Cities 97 or airplay on any other adult contemporary station. It is by far the best song on Beautiful Lonely.

This is juxtaposed to the tenth track, Prison, which is by far the worst song on the album. Prison is one of the least genuine songs I have heard in a long time. Here Courtney sings about getting out of a life sentence after doing time. Not only can no one believe this song is about an actual situation she experienced, the way the song is crafted is completely void of giving such an unfortunate situation the soulful telling it deserves. It is like Donald Trump singing about being homeless. The insincerity is irritating.

Beautiful Lonely is an inconsistent album. Less than half of the songs are alright pop numbers but the remainder of the album is filler and fluff. I could see this relatively safe album appealing to conservative young ladies, but beyond that demographic would be a stretch.

Rating: 5.7/10