The youngest daughter of Louis Prima, Lena is local royalty of sorts, one who lived here with her famous dad before setting off to make a career in the showrooms of Vegas. Now she’s returned with this Kickstarted debut, 14 songs that deal with her newfound lease on life: though she doesn’t go into details, her victory over a recent life-threatening illness apparently led her to do the prodigal gal thing and make a name for herself on her own terms.

She’s taken a lot of ol’ lost wages back with her, however. Her very precise, measured, mannered tones make her sound like nothing so much as the 5th Dimension’s Marilyn McCoo—though it’s not unpleasant, just a little odd, balanced as it is against her band’s mixture of ’60s soul revue and gentle roots-rock. (Her hosannas on CCR’s “Long as I Can See the Light” don’t carry the weight of John Fogerty’s, despite his considerably lesser range.) The main trouble is her refusal to dig as deep as she needs to: for every hint of autobiography like “Make You a Believer,” there’s a distracting attempt at a crowd-pleaser like “Muses Shoeses” or “Kickin’ It Old School,” a funk number too light to earn its Funkadelic references.

In general, Lena’s persona on Starting Something is quite appealing; even if she doesn’t have much to offer beyond the usual platitudes about positivity and following your dreams, she can still get you on her side with the reggae-tinged “This World” or the blues-rock of “Buy the Shoes” or the album’s best cut, “Back to Heaven,” where she leans on the double meaning of lines like “I believe that the time has come / to remember where we all come from.” Then on the next cut, as if to drive that home, she speaks of “aching bones and microphones and bands of hired guns.” That song’s called “I Believe in New Orleans,” and we can definitely use all of that we can get. But she really should trust in herself a little more.