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**1/2 Amanda Ghost

GHOST STORIES

(Warner Brothers)

Sponsored by Boy George (whom she reportedly met back in the 1980s while working the door at London’s Mud Club), Amanda Ghost (real name: Amanda Gosein) debuts with a session pithier than anything her backer’s done of late. It opens with the year’s most forceful hi-NRG song, the fast, rhythmic, and nasty “Filthy Mind” — a major dance-music hit. Fans of the Euro-haus genre will surely want to hear Ghost sing more numbers like it; unhappily for them, Ghost’s favored format is the plaintive monologue. With a reedy alto somewhat reminiscent of Suzanne Vega’s, Ghost sighs, complains, and whines her way through songs of romantic frustration (“The Wrong Man” and the magnificent “Empty”), risky changes (“Glory Girl”), quiet hope (“Silver Lining”), and advice to the self-possessed (“Idol,” “Blind Man”). The patience to bear with Ghost as she processes her insights and purges her disappointments rewards the listener to these heavy-hearted monologues. Unhappily, the untypical “Filthy Mind” is put at the session’s beginning and misleads the listener into expecting something quite different from what follows. Score one for the voice of Ghost herself, but zero for her handlers.

— Michael Freedberg