In the right hands (David Bowie, Cat Power), the covers album can be a daring statement of intent. In the wrong hands (Natalie Imbruglia), it feels at once evasive and presumptuous, a half-hearted attempt to fire inspiration where there is none.
Imbruglia scored a megahit with the tasteful angst of Torn in 1997, only to retreat to an island with a multi-millionaire husband, “successful, rich and terminally unhappy”, she has since confessed.
Funnily enough that’s precisely how she makes these 12 male-authored songs sound. A hairdresser-friendly rendering of Daft Punk’s Instant Crush makes you long for Julian Casablanca’s insouciant vocoder.
She does something upsetting to Neil Young’s Only Love can Break your Heart, while the banjo solo on Friday I’m in Love is quite simply disgusting.
Only Iron & Wine’s Naked as we Came survives her Ayurvedic whining. You can imagine a melancholy trophy wife putting this on in the private cabin of a super-yacht – before getting bored of that too.
(Portrait)
