Katharine McPhee has a cloudless voice and a warm, wide-eyed Alice in Wonderland quality that won her swarms of fans on American Idol's fifth season--if Simon Cowell had a ready antonym for "ghastly," there's little room for doubt about which contestant he would have applied it to. While debates over whether McPhee's considerable grace and talent should have won her the TV competition rage on across the Idol-viewing landscape, one thing's certain: she's made a debut album good enough to render such determinations meaningless. Katharine McPhee is an R&B-leaning pop disc that pulls the urgency and tenderness out of her voice and pins it smack in the center of each song. The slickly produced opener "Love Story" displays a certain swagger, and "Not Ur Girl" and "Open Toes" follow it up with still more spunk and attitude (something some McPhans asked to see more of on AI). If there's a crisp, smartly maneuvered Christina Aguilera-meets-Beyoncé-and-Mariah sensibility at work in those songs, the ballads belong to McPhee alone. "Somewhere over the Rainbow" made her a star on TV; "Ordinary World" and "Better off Alone" have the staying power to make her a star in music. --Tammy La Gorce
