Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 25/06/07
Label: Parlophone

Siobahn Donaghy was always the odd one out in the original Sugababes - a lanky book-worm trapped between two sharp-as-nails style queens. Citing "years of inter-band tension, personality clashes and creative grievances", Donaghy tearfully jumped ship just before the 'Babes went stellar with "Freak Like Me". Mutya Buena and Keisha Buchanan muttered in the press that Siobhan was - horror! - into indie rock, and it was all gearing up to be quite an exciting face-off.

Retained by her label, the willowy ginge was wheeled around London's spit'n'sawdust live venues and repackaged as a credible 'real' musician ahead of her 2003 debut solo album. But what a crashing disappointment that was. After her public longing to be free from production-line pop and being treated like a puppet etc, "Revolution In Me" was surprisingly tame - so much toothless drive-time wallpaper, etherealish vocals atop polite beats. We wanted bolshy and original. We got a shyer Dido.

Four years on and the landscape has transformed. Donaghy has seen the 'free-thinking UK femme-pop poster girl' vacancy she passed up being job-shared by Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse - what now for an unprepossessing romantic with a soul voice like demerara sugar? "Ghosts" does at least show a keener sense of direction than it's predecessor - dressed up on the album cover as the Lady Of Shallott-meets-Miss Havisham and with the similarly-clothed spirits of Kate Bush and Elizabeth Fraser wafting enigmatically through the music. Certainly, right now, no one else is doing anything similar.

Opener "Don't Give It Up" is a memorable, exquisitely-crafted tune, with equal measures of electro-dazzle and organic, bare-footed balladry and a big old mumsy embrace of a chorus that erupts fountain-like from its wrapping of zippy pulses and whooshes. The resemblance to Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel's "Don't Give Up" doesn't begin and end with the title: it's also there in the message of endurance-against-the-odds and the weeping angel singing style. Levity befitting of one so young swiftly and surely creeps in on the album's other highlights - there's a Burt Bacharach élan to "So You Say" and an equally sunny, '60s feel to "Sometimes". Sadly, strong melodies become increasingly harder to discern during the second half of the record.

In the main, Donaghy's lyrics have matured nicely. Instead of the endless "What does it all meeeean?"-type diary-scribblings of her last effort, we've got a fairly convincing catalogue of lost lovers, non-committal lovers, and in the largely acoustic, Dolly Parton-flecked "12 Bar Acid Blues", even a shaggy dog story about fleeing to Mexico only to end up in Moscow and ultimately jail. She's getting there. And it's much better than Mutya's album.

    by Anna Britten