Australia’s newest offering to the American pop charts comes in the form of singer/songwriter Missy Higgins’ new album, The Sound of White.
To an American audience, White is likely to sound a lot like a nondescript welding of Jewel and Vanessa Carlton — themselves two nondescript artists that attempt to play “piano-folk” music.
Like Jewel, she sings pretentious songs about downtrodden people named “Katie” who are stuck in unrequited love or an abusive relationship or some other cliché (Read: boring) circumstance.
Like Carlton, she often works the piano with such feigned vulnerability. It’s as if her arms have actually been tied to the bed posts by that insensitive lover she keeps talking about and she’s been forced to play her piano with her own pouty, pouty lips.
When I get depressed about life or love, personally, I love turning on really bad Ben Harper ballads or the Smashing Pumpkins’ universally shunned Adore album and listening to it all the way through a couple of times, because I really like to milk the emotion out of me (and Adore is so unabashedly depressing, one cant help but feel more than slightly melodramatic while listening to it).
This album vacillates so effortlessly between sappy melancholy and cheesy reassurances that I’m afraid if I listened to it any longer than for the purpose of reviewing it, I’d have to bolt to the bathroom to get rid of my lunch.
So I’m going to leave it at this: she’s the organic version of Vanessa Carlton — the version without all the pop arrangements and cutesy vocal variations. Higgins boasts (limited) dynamism in her own voice; however, where Carlton enjoys manipulating the emotional pull of her songs with abrupt and unnecessary transitions between an airy falsetto and her middle range, Higgins vocally demonstrates a more disciplined interpretation of her own lyrics by letting the words actually guide the emotion in her voice.
A novel idea, eh?
But, like I said, her lyrics are nothing to write home (to Melbourne) about.“What do you want me to think of my thoughts?” she sings on “This is How it Goes.” She continues,“Bear it in mind, if I cannot believe in me who will I then be?”
