Yahoo! Music Review

Released on 21/05/07
Label: Universal

Pop divadom is a cut-throat business; a girl's gotta have the sharpest frocks, the slickest eye-make up, the best sleeve design, the now-est beats and the most irresistible choruses, or she'll be tossed quickly and cruelly on the slag heap of past-it princesses. Although she's barely put a foot wrong since abandoning cult indiedom with theaudience for reincarnation as a dancefloor goddess, lantern-jawed lovely Sophie Ellis Bextor has her work cut out after a four-year break.

"Catch You", the Cathy Dennis-penned lead single from her third solo album, is a merciless first strike, a crisp, laser-cut, feather-light puff of dance-floor ephemera sprinkled with disco "pow!"s, its '70s synth-Chinoiserie chorus given an icy aloofness by Sophie's plummy delivery. Follow-up single "Me & My Imagination" is even better, old-school Sophie handbag house with a soft icy melody and a simple, smart lyrical concept. "I don't need to know your every trick, so keep me guessing just a little bit", coos Sophie.

Sadly, after unwisely cramming her two best songs so close to the start, she fails to heed her own advice and starts unnecessarily flashing her vulnerable side, which frankly, is just not her strong point. By only the third track in, the pace drops with "Today The Sun's On Us", a slow, downbeat, adult pop number, reminiscent of the Cardigans on a bad day. Truth be told, her voice isn't really strong enough for ballads, and it's definitely not shown off to its advantage to a song that recalls the naffer moments of Pink or Kelly Clarkson.

The late New Order-ish "New York City Lights", meanwhile, would be a great song in other hands, but Sophie's cut-glass vocals don't quite cut it, better suited as they are to arch and seductive than emotive or euphoric. Too many songs on the album ("China Heart", "The Distance Between Us", "New Flame") are little more than 'alright', lacking in that something kinda ooh, and are likely to inspire more skipping than tripping. Tedium, after all, is the first cardinal sin of pop.

So it's mystifying that two more upbeat numbers - particularly "Supersonic", a new-wave space-disco collaboration with Fred Schneider of The B52's - are cast as bonus tracks. Why not just have them as album tracks, because it's surely the swinging stuff that works. Both "If I Can't Dance", with its jerky, Girls Aloud-esque rhythm, which finds Sophie tartly telling her stiff limbed lover, "Oh darling, don't be so unkind / The beat must never be denied", and the Nelly Furtado-ish samba hip hop of "If You Go" are sure-footed sparklers. All in all, though, "Trip The Light Fantastic" stumbles short of the disco sublime it tries so hard to invoke. Keep on trying, Sophie.

    by Emily Mackay