'Drastic Fantastic' by KT Tunstall

The second studio album from KT Tunstall, ‘Drastic Fantastic’ is pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a follow up to ‘Eye To The Telescope’ – another set of well written pop songs with a dash of folk thrown in but struggling to be heard over the slightly too glossy production.

Starting an album with a recording of an old b-side demonstrates either a great confidence in your work, or a real desperation. Happily, ‘Little Favours’ is a decent, breezy opening, though ‘If Only’, which follows, is more interesting. ‘White Bird’ is a tricky one – write an acoustic based track and name it after a bird, and you will be compared to Paul McCartney, and you will come off worse – but it’s a nice enough song on its own merit. Actually, ‘nice enough’ sums up the album pretty well. It’s all pretty good, but it’s pretty safe, and there’s little in the way of progression from album number one. This is a shame, as the ‘Acoustic Extravaganza’ album released in the interim had been really good, but it’s perhaps inevitable – the record company would presumably have wanted another big seller, and most of the songs on this album were written before or around the time of her debut.

Things are most interesting when Tunstall experiments. ‘Hold On’ is a riotous clatter of elements that only just holds together, but it’s all the better for it, and ‘Beauty of Uncertainty’ uses a dream-like backing track and echoey vocal line to good effect. It’s just a shame that the record doesn’t have more of such things.