Lissie Maurus (born and raised in Rock Island, Illinois) has a gorgeous voice. Her songs are full of soul, have plenty of hooks, and she certainly knows her way around her guitar; but does her debut LP Catching A Tiger evince the essential spark that will turn her from a dainty southern belle into a real firecracker?

The album starts strong, with some pleasingly home-made sounding percussion on ‘Record Collector’, and Lissie’s instantly striking vocals; sultry, grounded in saw dust, effortlessly enchanting. If you’ve heard, or heard of the girl before, it’s what you’ll have come to expect; which will either leave you unprepared for the quality of the instrumentation, of blissfully unaware of it. Whilst Lissie is clearly a competent song writer, her voice could be her making and undoing, her reliance on its natural timbre distracting her from fully exploring its more subtle possibilities.

Second track ‘When I Am Alone’ is the first indication that this album could live up to the hype. A galloping beat and foot stomping riff underpin some pretty breathtaking vocals. The chorus is rousing, the bridge is suitably melodramatic and epic; it just falls a little flat for want of that little quirk, embellishment, or groove. Equally strong is ‘Stranger’, which does an admirable job of sounding like it’s playing on beat up vinyl and somehow manages to sound like a cross between Buddy Holly, Shania Twain and The Pet Shop Boys. In short, it’s quite brilliant; a slice of utterly sun-bleached pop evocative of lounging on a bale of hay (by the sea?!) staring up at the clouds.

Lissie clearly has an incredibly rich seam of mostly untapped potential. This is a strong debut, with a few great songs, but it will be her second album that hopefully throws up the surprises, the idiosyncratic moments, the little extra something that really allows her to strike it rich. Indeed, if the album was as consistently good as the aforementioned ‘When I Am Alone‘ and ‘Stranger’, we’d have an absolutely bloody must-buy on our hands. As it stands though, the Tiger that Lissie has reeled in with her first launch of her lasso has a gorgeous coat and a silken purr, it’s just a little domesticated.