ose Kemp has been playing musical chairs since she was a teenager. From folk to a cappella to post rock, the 22-year-old has crossed the board throughout her short career. The daughter of Steeleye Span members Maddy Prior and Rick Kemp, she provided backing vocals for the folk-rock band from an early age. Since then she’s played in her mother’s a cappella group (Maddy Prior and the Girls), released an acoustic pop album under her own name and currently moonlights in Jeremy Smoking Jacket (an improvisational pop duo), and VILNA (an instrumental post rock band).

These influences all find their way on to A Hand Full of Hurricanes, which fuses PJ Harvey’s guttural swagger and primitive riffs with several atmospheric adorned songs that, while providing a respite from the thunder, ultimately drag the album down. Because, for all its melodic intent and instrumental interplay, A Hand Full of Hurricanes is over wrought and under cooked—an angst-ridden record full of relationship-fuelled diatribes and therapeutic musings that lack cohesiveness or lyrical clout.

Kemp opens the album with her most obvious PJ Harvey homage. It also happens to be her best song. “Little One” mixes Harvey’s early, simple bluesy chord progressions with her latter day grandeur. Kemp’s vocal, like Harvey’s, seems to emanate not up and out, but actually inverts itself as if she’s sucking everything in, allowing emotions to travel down her gulley before barking them back up. Similarly, second track “Violence” apes Harvey’s hard-hitting approach, utilizing sonic impact over lyrical ingenuity, thumping listeners with a visceral riff as its chorus.

Repeated listens however, do peg Kemp as much more than simple pastiche. The eclectic abstract atmospherics of “Orange Juice” and “Skin’s Suite,” are more akin, instrumentally, to latter era Radiohead, while the a cappella “Sister Sleep” harks back to the singer’s folk upbringing. The opening of “Skin’s Suite” echoes Coco Rosie, while her melodies throughout also bring to mind a rocked-out Regina Spektor.

But, not to labor a point, the PJ Harvey comparisons are valid in many ways—the guttural vocals, the bare, open music, the heartfelt passionate performance—yet Kemp lacks her fellow Brits authentic wherewithal. When Harvey sang “Gonna wash that man right out of my hair” you believed her, but when Kemp states (emphatically, it must be added), “The stupidest thing I’ve ever done / But it was so much fun” you question her without even knowing the act she’s referencing.

The lyrics are the problem: The intricate “Tiny Flower,” built around looped vocals and a simple beat, is basically a four-line summation of Chicken Soup for the Soul (“Sometimes you feel like a tiny flower growing up through the pavement / Though you’re tired and weary / Though you’re back is breaking / You’re a triumph over adversity”). Correspondingly, the sweet, lullaby melody of “Sheer Terror” is admonished by lyrics that traverse the precipice of weighty and woeful (“If living your life like a rock star doesn’t kill your first / Or the sex and the drugs pass you by / We can always hope that we’re the 2 in 3 who don’t get the big ‘C’”).

Despite all this, Kemp has a canny knack for off-kilter melodies that, like the tiny flower she references in the track of the same name, seem to grow out of nothing, bursting forth, mid-song, in a Houdini haze. It’s a shame then that the songs themselves, and the sentiments they contain, don’t do the vocals justice. Moments do come into focus, but they are fleeting; enough to keep you engaged, but not enough to keep you ensconced, making A Hand Full of Hurricanes sound like a small storm in a rather big teacup.