RECORD REVIEWS

LITTLE MIX

Album: “Salute” (Syco/Columbia)

Grade: C-

Little Mix touched down in the U.S. last year with surprising force, scoring the highest-ever chart debut for a British girl group’s first album. (Sorry, Spice Girls.) But might success have come too soon for these alums of the U.K. “X Factor”? Where the women put across an up-for-anything spirit on their debut album, “DNA” — most memorably in the effervescent disco-funk jam “How Ya Doin’?” — here they sag under the weight of too many wind-swept piano ballads and booming productions seemingly modeled on Katy Perry’s “Roar.” You hear power in the music, but also the group’s determination to hang onto it.

Flashes of the playful old Little Mix appear in the dubstep-laced “Move” and “Nothing Feels Like You,” a bubbly dance track built on a percussive hand-clap groove. And “Competition” has a campy musical- theater quality that puts the group’s new dramatic streak to good use. But more typical of “Salute” is the dreary “These Four Walls,” about “the feeling that the end has come.” What a buzz kill.

—Mikael Wood, Associated Press

ROBERT ELLIS

Album: “The Lights from the Chemical Plant” (New West)

Grade: B

Robert Ellis is an exacting songwriter. On his third album, the Lone Star State native, now living in Nashville, goes to work with Tom Waits and Kings of Leon producer Jaquire King. He presents his detail-oriented narratives in a variety of settings, from bossa nova to bluegrass. As he flirts with jazz and honky-tonk, and faithfully covers Paul Simon’s “Still Crazy After All These Years,” Ellis is musically promiscuous but narratively precise. His nasal vocal delivery recalls Willie Nelson, but there’s nothing casual about it; he’s not the kind to leave a word or a note out of place.

—Dan DeLuca, Philadelphia Inquirer

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY

Album: “The Song Is You” (Shanachie)

Grade: B

Twenty-odd years have passed since her last secular album, but it’s not as if Jennifer Holliday’s presence hasn’t been felt. During Broadway’s original run of “Dreamgirls,” the Tony-winning actress /singer set the standard for belting out emotional songs of independence with “And I Am Telling You, I’m Not Going.”

With that ringing barnstormer, Holliday opened the door for a million vocal competition contestants, the best of whom, Jennifer Hudson, won an Oscar for the film of Holliday’s hit musical.

The 53-year-old diva didn’t benefit as much from her “Dreamgirls” fame as Hudson, but Holliday is three times the vocalist when it comes to both thunder and quiet nuance.

The native Texan relies on her roots in the church and gospel for her husky, holy inflection.

—A.D. Amorosi, Philadelphia Inquirer