Whoa, Nelly!

Though not much older than Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, Nelly Furtado is an artist whose music stands head and shoulders above the manufactured pop pap that rules the charts right now.

Weaving fragmented elements of hip-hop, folk, and bossa nova, Whoa, Nelly! is one wildly entertaining multicultural jam.... Though her lyrics are a lot smarter than today's average pop offering, they do wear the more common clichés of hippy-chick wisdom a little too proudly at times. But that's OK: If she's got to get her cosmic ya-yas out, the first record's the place to do it.

Okay, so it suffers from repetition in places and the last pair of songs are arguably disposable, but this collection shines and sparkles as an impressive debut.

From that first play, it's evident that Furtado is indeed an audacious songwriter, not at all hesitant to bare her emotions, tackle winding melodies, and bend boundaries to the point that much of the record sounds like folk-pop tinged with bossa nova and backed by a production designed for TLC.

The Canadian-Portuguese singer Nelly Furtado embodies classy cosmopolitan pop: Her roots obviously stretch across the globe, and her music by extension embraces a record store's worth of influences.

Whoa, Nelly! is spastic like high-impact hip-hop, melodically durable like big-time pop and soulfully, intelligently, sensuously international.

Furtado occasionally comes off sounding like a modern day Billie Holiday with her crisp, yet subtle vibrato filtering through a slick production that holds the record together. But while one can easily detect a smattering of her worldly intentions, it's the big one eyed pop monster that seems to win out in almost every instance.

Allowing bonus points for successfully merging personal lyrics and shuffling beats without once evoking lazy trip-hop, she still too often confuses blandness for adult sophistication.