Album Review: KT Tunstall - Invisible Empire//Crescent Moon

Sadness has oft been championed as a key ingredient for making art. Such is the case with KT Tunstall's follow-up to 2010's Tiger Suit, Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon. During its making, Tunstall's marriage fell apart and her father suddenly passed away. Rather than mulling over morbidity, she funnelled the tragedies into her music, creating an album wrought with melancholy and tinged with hope.

Opener, Invisible Empire, carries with it the same alt.pop sounds of Tunstall's 2004 debut, Eye To The Telescope, but with added depth and soul. You can feel her resolution to drawing a bad hand as she coos, “But I look to the chips I lose/Standing on the platform with my neck in the noose/And I know it's not my time/Not my time”.

Tunstall explores her marriage breakdown in Made Of Glass. Sorrowful and close to tears, whistles and a near-absent guitar whisper in the background as Tunstall's voice begs, 'Fire me in an oven/Until I go hard enough/To deal with losing you”, giving her sound a maturity sorely lacking in her earlier material.

An eclectic mix of trippy and psychedelic guitar-made sound effects pepper the chorus of Carried, while Tunstall takes her inner troubadour for a stroll in Old Man Song, a tune soothed by feathered guitars and wistful strings that cradle Tunstall's whispered vocals. Yellow Flower – the only piano-driven track on the album – is a ballad of sorts that hums like a broken lullaby Tunstall sighing “You are the yellow flower of my youth”.

As the album proves, heartache, it seems, suits Tunstall to a tee.