Sia, Some People Have Real Problems
Former Zero 7 singer crafts a bitter sweet symphony.
Like Aimee Mann and Fiona Apple, Sia Furler channels trying times into emotional songs. The problems the Australia-born singer addresses on her third album, Some People Have Real Problems, are indeed real: In “Little Black Sandals,” she's walking away from the guy who was “the line between pleasure and pain”; in “You Have Been Loved,” she recalls the ex who “took away my last hope”; and in “The Girl You Lost to Cocaine,” she finally breaks free from someone who is on his way down. But the tracks, which often start intimate but turn epic, are flush with large-hearted string arrangements, outsized crescendos, and hyperverbal lyricism. Simply put, Some People is too passionate for moping to even be an option.
Sia, who first made a name for herself in the '90s singing with Jamiroquai and Zero 7, is probably best known for “Breathe Me,” which closed out the 2005 finale of HBO's Six Feet Under. The song got her a lot of attention, and she's not squandering the opportunity. On Some People, she flaunts her considerable stylistic range, from blue-eyed soul (as on “Day Too Soon” and her cover of “I Go to Sleep,” written by Ray Davies but most memorably recorded by the Pretenders), to precocious and matter-of-fact, as if courting St. Vincent's blog-star cult status (see “Academia,” on which Beck appears). The only question now is: What kind of music can we expect if everything starts going her way?
