Last week, a peculiar, solicitous email did the rounds of the nation's inboxes. For once, it didn't want your money in exchange for an unmissable investment opportunity or a fearsome-looking device guaranteed to enlarge your penis. It came from the website popjustice.com, and it was after your ideas. "Rachel Stevens' new single is predicted to enter the charts at number 10," it wailed. "This clearly isn't working. What should be Rachel's next move? Tell us now." Over on the website itself, a similar theme was being dolefully explored: "We really like Rachel, as you know, but surely there comes a point when you just pack up and go home, if only for the sake of your own sanity."
You have to take their point. By Sunday, I Said Never Again (But Here We Are) had slipped two places to number 12: in manufactured pop terms, it may as well not have made the charts at all. It is Stevens' third dud single in a row. Two years ago, her success seemed a sure thing - she had the tweeny following from S Club 7, she had the media spotlight and she clearly had someone on her team who thought success lay in making envelope-pushing pop singles like Sweet Dreams My LA Ex. Now, that clanging noise you can just make out behind I Said Never Again's unruly blend of Adam and the Ants drumming, acid house squelch and bovver-booted glam is someone ringing time in the last chance saloon.
There are few sounds in music more wretched than manufactured pop that isn't popular: stripped of its raison d'etre, it suddenly sounds brittle and hopeless. So, Come and Get It - surely doomed to shuffle straight from the new-release schedules to the bargain bins - should theoretically be up there with Nick Drake's Pink Moon and Hüsker Dü's Candy Apple Grey in the pantheon of albums so depressing you can hardly bear to listen to them. Bizarrely, it turns out to be a riot, thanks to a stellar team of pop producers - including Richard X, Xenomania, and Rob Davis, co-writer of Kylie's Can't Get You Out of My Head - who seem to have taken the precarious state of Stevens' career as an excuse to let their imaginations run amok: it's probably going to flop, we may as well experiment.
Its inventiveness may have been born of desperation, but the end result is bursting with risky ideas. It's All About Me and I Will Be There respectively attach gleaming production-line pop ballads to a sample from the Cure's Lullaby and the kind of bubbling synthesizer melody that powered New Order's Your Silent Face. Crazy Boys features among its panoply of delights thundering timpani, a beat that simultaneously recalls Daft Punk's Da Funk and Slade's Coz I Luv You, and ethereal electronics that appear to have escaped from the soundtrack of an early 1980s schools and colleges programme about the miracle of the microchip. Je M'Appelle has preposterous rave synthesizers, a bump'n'grind rhythm track and a malevolent bass that, bizarrely enough, brings to mind Steve Albini's 1980s noise-mongers Big Black.
But while Come and Get It regularly thrills you with its audacity, it also suggests a reason why Stevens' career has gone so haywire. It's Stevens herself. Somewhere along the way, every drop of personality has been wrung from her. She can't do feisty and weirdly, given her ongoing willingness to flash her suspenders in lads' mags, she is completely incapable of doing sexy. She breathily coos about letting you find paradise in her secret garden and you wind up thinking about something owned by the National Trust. On Je M'Appelle, she makes sexual role-play seem about as exciting as a visit to Homebase, with the aid of a disastrous French accent. "Je m'appelle Rash-ell," she pants, bringing to mind not a Gallic temptress but Herr Flick and ze fallen Madonna wiz ze big boobies.
Occasionally, her producers skilfully turn Stevens' lack of emotional engagement into a virtue, as on Richard X's remarkable Some Girls, which has her playing a vacuous wannabe whose plans for success have gone awry. More often, it's the undoing of an otherwise fantastic album. Whatever Stevens' shortcomings, Come and Get It deserves to be a hit. It is packed with brilliant, cutting-edge pop music. Instead, it seems more likely to end up a very 2005 kind of failure. Stevens may be the first pop star in history to have been media-trained out of a job.