Album Review: Katie Melua - Secret Symphony

When you sing a classic like Love Me Tender, you've got to seriously deliver some emotion. But there's something not quite right about Melua's version; it seems orchestrated. Not orchestral, mind you ­– the cover, and indeed the whole album, is quite minimal and sparse when it comes to instruments. Rather, it seems put on, a façade acting out each scene perfectly but without conviction. On more than one occasion Melua conjures a picture of Julie Andrews singing among the mountains of Austria, with the Disney soundtrack feel most evident on the title track Secret Symphony and Better Than A Dream.

Melua has been quoted as saying that she wanted to do an album mostly of other people's songs as “singing other people's songs brings something out of you and your voice that isn't perhaps where you would have gone vocally with your own material”. Yet it's on her own tracks (Forgetting All My Troubles), and those where she teams with regular collaborator Mike Batt (The Cry Of Tthe Lone Wolf and Heartstrings) that she is most relaxed, strong and convincing. Heartstrings especially, with its full '50s orchestra sound and Hawaiian guitar, offers some sprightliness to an otherwise dreary selection of songs.

The Bessie Smith classic Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out comes across more cabaret than blues, exemplifying Melua's excellence in technique whilst somehow missing the soul of the track. It's the pantomime style annunciation and phenomenal yet vapid technical skills that make tracks like Heartstrings and Moonshine successful, moments of blithe frivolity that suit her sunny voice. There's enough on Secret Symphony to keep fans happy and interested, but I doubt she'll be winning many new ones with her attempts at reinterpretation on the covers.