For a woman apparently ill-suited to anything more taxing than standing around nightclubs in a pair of really enormous sunglasses, Paris Hilton is quite the polymath. In recent years, the hotel heiress has variously revealed herself to be a TV star, a perfumier, a jewellery designer, a nightclub owner, a model, an actor and an author (albeit one whose book, Confessions of an Heiress, was described by a disgruntled Amazon customer as "a huge blow to the medium of literature as a whole"). You read her CV and boggle at what wildly improbable occupation she might turn her hand to next. Spot-welding? Cognitive neuropsychology?

Alas, no: it's singing. Lest one carp, Hilton has been quick to point out that singing is a vocation for which she is eminently skilled. "I know music," she reassured the Sunday Times children's section. "I hear it every single day."

While this obviously gives Hilton a massive advantage over those who have never heard any music and thus believe it to be a variety of cheese, there remains the nagging suspicion that this might not represent sufficient qualification for a career as a singer, in much the same way as knowing what a child is does not fully equip you for a career as a consultant paediatrician.

Nevertheless, you have to admire her pluck. Putting your name to a ghostwritten book, appearing on reality TV shows and launching your own perfume collectively represent the sine qua non of 21st-century celebrity: they all do it. But for some reason, a public only too willing to watch celebrities on TV, read their books and douse themselves in their branded scents balks when asked to listen to them sing. Jordan couldn't win A Song for Europe. The minute Kelly Osbourne starts singing, audiences rise as one in order to throw things at her.

Understandably, those behind Hilton's debut album have left little to chance, employing a vast team of crack producers and songwriters. Some decisions regarding membership of said team seem a little baffling - when Hilton's record label decided a reggae track "would be a really good fit", they naturally called songwriter Shep Solomon, famed for mashing up Kingston dancehalls with militant Rastafarian collective S Club 7 and ragga's Queen of Slackness Natalie Imbruglia - but you can't argue with its hit-making pedigree. We should perhaps draw a veil over Kara DioGuardi, whose penchant for collaborating with Celine Dion and Pop Idol's Darius makes her less a songwriter than a public nuisance, and instead focus on Scott Storch - producer to urban royalty from Busta Rhymes to Beyoncé - and Billy Steinberg. The latter's songwriting CV reads like the track listing of a CD with a steering wheel on the cover and sleeve notes by Jeremy Clarkson: Eternal Flame, Alone (by Heart), I Drove All Night and the Divinyls' I Touch Myself.

It would be churlish to deny they have done their job. The songs are uniformly well-turned. There is decaf R&B, Strokes-esque new wave pastiches, pop house, and lyrics that hint at Hilton's private life: Jealousy takes aim at her skeletal nemesis Nicole Richie, while Screwed vaguely references the porn tape marketed by her oily ex-boyfriend.

But as Turn It Up cranks into life, you realise why Hilton felt it necessary to confirm to the Sunday Times that she knew what music was. She sings like a woman who has heard of something called singing, can't be sure of exactly what it might entail, but is fairly certain you do something a bit like this. She sounds both distracted and bored stiff, as if making an album is keeping her from the more serious business of standing around a nightclub in a pair of really enormous sunglasses.

On Stars Are Blind, the combination of tinny cod-reggae and your-call-is-being-held-in-a-queue vocal technique results in something so plasticky, it's perversely enjoyable. Elsewhere, Hilton's audible lack of interest torpedoes her own chances. Someone has encouraged her to make erotically charged squeals of affirmation and panting noises, with deleterious results. "Yah! Uh-huh-huh! Yah!" she huffs, like a Sloane Ranger having an asthma attack.

Listening to her sing Rod Stewart's Do Ya Think I'm Sexy, you are gripped by the fear that civilisation as we know it is doomed and that brimstone is going to start raining from the sky any minute. It doesn't, but a sense of terrible foreboding is further stoked by the sleeve notes, which make reference to "all my albums to come". You might call that another example of the sheer force of will that has got Hilton so far in so many improbable careers, but on the basis of the 11 tracks here, it sounds more like a threat.