Let’s face it; if Amy Winehouse hadn’t been able to enlist the slinky Midas touch of marvellous man-of-the-moment Mark Robson, it’s entirely likely she would have disappeared into the ether of the pleasant yet awkwardly underwhelming ‘Frank’ album, such was the dangerously fragile nature of the ‘Chavette/Billie Holliday’ binary. She had the voice, no doubt about it, but she had only one decent song to her credit, and though she might be limping along her street of dreams like the celebrated social and emotional cripple that she patently now is, she is at least doing it with a bagful of Grammies and a Brit Award. And though it would be difficult to slide a coin between their slurring and endlessly elastic vocal ranges, Sia Furler at least seems to be doing it without the cosmetic scaffolding and the disastrous heroin chic.
More famous as vocalist for Zero 7 (Simple Things, When It Falls and The Garden), this bendy downtempo Australian has already scored a solo hit with her song ‘Breathe Me’ which featured in the final episode of ‘Six Feet Under’ at the back end of 2005. Add to that no small amount of British airplay for the soaring and emollient, ‘Day Too Soon’ (the one where she keeps doing that crazy yodelling bit with her voice) and you have the impression of a versatile artist furrowing a deep, but not always straight path to commercial success. In fact, versatility might be the one thing that makes, breaks or drowns her in obscurity, something which new album, ‘Some People Have Real Problems’ makes only too apparent. Whilst we can only sit back and bask in the soothing, oddball screwiness of tracks like ‘Academia’ (featuring Beck and no end of beck motifs), ivory thumping rock-outs like, ‘The Girl You Lost To Cocaine’ are apt to leave the listener with something a bewildered expression. It’s a bit like settling down to a good Jack Kerouac novel, only to find it interspersed with pages from ‘Good Housekeeping’. On the one hand it’s gorgeous, quirky and challenging (‘Death By Chocolate, ‘Lentil’, ‘Soon We’ll Be Found’, Lullaby’) and on the other it’s unapologetically bland (‘Little Black Sandals’, ‘I Go To Sleep’, ‘Beautiful Calm Driving’).
Produced by Jimmy Hogarth (James Blunt, Suzanne Vega, Half Cousin, Amy Winehouse, Bailey Rae, KT Tunstall) ‘Some People Have real Problems’ is a colourful yet occasionally patchy brew of spicy, foamy gorgeousness and idle, lukewarm posturing. A bit like Starbucks all round, really.
File under Winehouse, Buffy, Furtado and something a bit more crazy.
ALBUM: ‘SOME PEOPLE HAVE REAL PROBLEMS’ – OUT 8TH JANUARY 2008