Rosabella GregoryEverything Comes TogetherReview

Oscillating arpeggios and slave labour collide on this debut album from half Egyptian, Devon-raised singer songwriter Gregory. A Royal College of Music graduate, there's more than a hint of the kind of prodigious skill you would expect from somebody who has had ample time to spend in empty classrooms with baby grand pianos.

Third person narratives are a strong point of Gregory's style. India, China breaches the topic of Far Eastern sweatshops without too much preaching as Gregory guiltily muses, ''As I'm eating my dinner, the girl I won't meet is making five hundred shirts and long skirts with a pleat''. Elodie is the heroine of a nefarious tale that could have come from the pen of Pat Barker or Jean Rhys. ''Elodie doesn't like the man her mother invited to stay/ Elodie says she makes him angry, so she stays out of his way''. The vignette is crisply addressed by Gregory over the top of some ebullient piano riffs with just the right amount of cagy menace.

Nothing else on the rest of the album comes close to this marriage of melody and bridled rage but it's the arrangements verging just on the right side of the scholarly that regularly come to the rescue of some of the more irritating lyrics which reach an embarrassing nadir on Stars where, coming across like Lilly Allen's whiney older sister, Gregory tells us of her days spent ''pouring out the granola, measuring the cost/ I'm not counting calories, just all the years I’ve lost''.

Ultimately - despite the odd lyrical own goal - Gregory’s endearing skittishness, vehement voice and lyrical subjects which ensure that this has too much of an abrasive edge to become dinner party music.