There are moments on "The Sweet Escape" where Gwen Stefani [ tickets ] comes across as a bratty adolescent, moments where she delivers like a pop-music diva, and moments where she unleashes like a club queen vixen. While she tends to succeed at all three, the one thing missing from the No Doubt frontwoman's sophomore solo venture is a sense of consistency.

Opening the album with a yodeling tribute to Roger & Hammerstein's "The Lonely Goatherd," Stefani shifts from "The Sound of Music" to hip-hop laced, dance club bopping on lead single "Wind it Up." The album's title track follows with more sugary-sweet, power-to-the-ladies lyrics that hearken back to Madonna circa "True Blue," the autobiographical "Orange County Girl" satisfies R&B fancies, and the ballad "Early Winter" offers a safe retread of the No Doubt hit "Simple Kind of Life." From shopping malls to school halls and urban sprawl, Stefani has as divergent an audience as anyone in music, and she makes it clear early on that "The Sweet Escape" will make every effort to embrace them all.

To her credit, the results seldom fail to be catchy, and are always fun. The hip-hop beats that propel "Now That You Got It" will fill many a dance floor, and standout track "Yummy" is an infectious offering of simple percussion, synthesized effects and a quasi-spoken word duet with rapper Pharrell. "Fluorescent" merges Prince's "Purple Rain" and Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation" into a seductive world of sultry music and sassy lyrics, while "Breakin' Up" marries a techno hum with more ho-hum, teen-targeted lyrics that parallel a failing relationship to a fading cell phone signal.

Stefani--armed with an array of producers that includes The Neptunes on five songs and No Doubt bassist/ex-boyfriend Tony Kanal on three--flirts with moments of brilliance: The beats are consistent, the lyrics are consistently drama queen, and the outing offers more than its share of sweet escapes. Unfortunately, it plays more like a collection of disparate singles than it does a free-flowing album. The songbird siren does a commendable job as the glue that holds the tracks together, but there's not a lot here that ultimately sticks.