For all her girl-next-door glamour, the grim hand of failure looms heavy over Natalie Imbruglia. Certainly, since the phenomenal worldwide success of “Left Of The Middle” her career trajectory has resembled an albatross with a pair of concrete wings - follow-up album “White Lilies Island” filled bargain bins all over Europe while her acting career disappeared down the same dumper after an appearance in the woefully unfunny “Johnny English".
Frankly, about the only thing she’s proved much cop at is appearing in frighteningly soft-focussed make-up commercials.
With this in mind, there’s a definite a sense of ‘last chance saloon’ hanging over “Counting Down The Days” which probably explains why Imbruglia has refocused her career around the current trend for maudlin and slightly downbeat ballads. It’s certainly born out by the album’s opening lines: “Starting today, I’m not going to waste another moment/Even if I had the chance before, I would have blown it”.
On the face of it, such factors should have made this project a fairly risk-averse major label venture – co-written and co-produced to within an inch of it’s life and aimed squarely at the “Bridget Jones” crowd. Except, and here’s the rub, “Counting Down The Days” actually contains a handful of genuinely great songs.
The first of these, “Satisfied”, was written by Imbruglia’s husband, ex-Silverchair frontman Daniel Johns, and sounds disarmingly like The Beatles. No sh*t, especially the piano-led middle-eight, which could be one of the perkier numbers off the "White Album". The title track is pretty decent too – a superior piece of pop with shades of ABBA. And to top it all there’s the closing “Honeycomb Child”. Co-written by David ‘Faultline’ Kosten, it places Imbruglia’s voice amidst a Bjorkesque landscape of music boxes, bells and violins and, again, works brilliantly.
Admittedly, not everything is as successful. Between these highs the record does stutter into more predictable waters, none more so than the single “Shiver” which seems to exist for no other reason that to be “Torn” Mk II, and thereby prevent Imbruglia’s most well-known moment from becoming any more of a millstone that it probably already is. Lyrically too, especially considering the trauma surrounding the album’s making (Johns underwent a well-publicised battle with anorexia and reactive arthritis), it’s a wee bit bland. Suffice to say that Imbruglia, if she wrote the lyrics, must have a pretty well-thumbed rhyming dictionary.
But still, these are quibbles. You can always download the best bits. Mostly you’d have to say that this is a pretty agreeable piece of work, and on several occasions quite sublime. All in, a real surprise.
