** Vanessa-Mae

STORM

(Virgin)

Electric-violinist Vanessa-Mae is only 19 years old (and on Virgin Records, ha ha), but her three-million-units-sold-already put her in that rare category: classical music that people actually buy. She wears wet T-shirts in videos despite coming from Singapore, where people get caned for less. And she scores a major conceptual coup on her new album by covering back-to-back Donna Summer's techno-loop prototype "I Feel Love" and Focus's yodel-metal operetta "Hocus Pocus," probably the two most eccentric Eurorock-rooted hit singles of the '70s.

Otherwise Storm amounts to lots of wanking (if that term can still apply to adolescent girls) and wheedling -- this is showoff music, like drum solos or drum 'n' bass or bluegrass or Yngwie Malmsteen, with way too many notes. To her credit, Vanessa is far from a purist, and eagerly eclectic in her quest for beauty: jazz-fusion spyrogyrating, French-perfumed flamenco seduction, geometric Bach fugues. But only at its giddiest does this prodigy's string recital feel truly audacious -- "(I) Can, Can (You?)," a speed-jigged electronic can-can dotted with girl-giggled pheromone-releasing phonemes, is bizarrely infantile bubblegum, and it cracks me up. I don't want a wet-T-shirted teenage violinist with good taste; I want one who tastes good.

-- Chuck Eddy