‘Eye To The Telescope’ by KT Tunstall

KT Tunstall’s debut album is a slightly curious affair. In many ways, it’s really good. Tunstall writes great songs, plays them well, and has a good voice – so pretty much all you could want in an album, particularly a debut. Somehow, though, it just doesn’t sound quite as good as it should. Not bad, not by a long way, but mildly frustrating.

Opening track ‘Other Side Of The World’ embodies the album as a whole. A lovely song, but covered in so much studio gloss, the soul of the song is slightly buried. ‘Another Place To Fall’ has a bit more edge, to its benefit, and ‘Under The Weather’, which is far more stripped back, also sounds better. ‘Black Horse And The Cherry Tree’ is the first great track, a stitched-together collage of Tunstall’s vocal and guitar with little backing necessary.

The middle section then flags a minute. All the songs on their own are good, but the sequencing lets them down. ‘False Alarm’ especially suffers from its proximity to ‘Universe & U’ – it’s too similar in pitch and tempo, and is robbed of its value as a result.

The end to the album is great, however, and this is the point where the album could have really gone downhill. The final four songs each have their own distinctive styles, and the contrast is very effective. As a result, the album has more than enough strengths to be good – it just could have been better. Her next album, the ‘Acoustic Extravaganza’ shows what might have been if she’d only been able to record the songs as written.