Sia was always an enigma of music even before she became a household name and before she covered her face. She was just born to sing and write music. But she doesn’t pursue music fervently like a musicologist or that guy who bought every Beatles record. In fact she doesn’t really listen to music at all.
She consumed the surrounding culture, the reaction that people had to music and then made her art from interpreting that.
From her swallowing concrete acid RnB debut Healing Is Difficult to the salted caramel of Some People Have Real Problems she made music from osmoses, drawing the world’s love of music rather than being inspired by a particular artist.
She became a master of the metaphor; realising pop hooks are both lyrical and melodic using titles like ‘Diamonds’ and ‘Cannonball’ to detail life-affirming messages. It’s a formula that has made her the most in-demand pop songwriter, and this was from an indie artist who was dropped from two record labels and seriously considered becoming a professional dog walker. But even if you’re in demand, sometimes they won’t buy your product.
This Is Acting is made of songs rejected or cut by many of Sia’s biggest clients, particularly Adele and Rihanna who both released albums in the last three months (in Rihanna’s case yesterday). What is so odd about all these songs is that although you see elements of other singers in its writing, you can’t believe anyone BUT Sia could sing them, even when its lyrics are nothing like Sia would normally sing.
[include_post id=”468369″]Take hit single ‘Alive’ written for Adele. The lyrics are utterly saccharine but totally genuine, the vocal lines have all the chutzpah to be taken by Adele’s masterfully controlled voice. But Sia slays it because she sings it like a racecar driver. She throws her wide voice from whispers in your ear to banshee screams of an inebriated tourist on Hollywood Boulevard.
‘Birds Set Free’ prepared for Pitch Perfect 2 alongside song ‘Flashlight’ (also written by Sia) is so remarkably Sia from the way that it echoes the piano style lines of ‘Breathe Me’ but without the peachfuzz dusk of despair and into her true element, uplifiting life affirming choruses. It’s a marvelous song that treads familiar for Sia but still feels fresh. She later stales on her song themes, but we’ll get to that.
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Sia writes songs for money some of these songs are not what we would call typical Sia fare. Take ‘Move Your Body’. It is irresistibly catchy but Sia has never been an artist you’d see ‘moving her body’. And the lyrics talk about turning someone on with your rhythm?
It is confusing but you let her off. It’s not called This Is Acting for nothing.
Sia has an adoration of using child-like voices or altering her own into infancy. With her reggae tinged ‘Cheap Thrills’ she has a yelling choir of tweens to back what would have been a bit of a weak chorus. Its lyrical themes are bland but the production is fun and feel-good. Totally glad Rihanna didn’t record this one. It would be Rihanna pre-Good Girl Gone Bad and they would not have used the kids.
‘Reaper’ written with Kanye West, is almost Jackson 5 skipping rope music with a morse code guitar counterrhythm. It is such an oddball of a song, like a throwback to the 2014 film of Annie if it was set in a Zombie Apocalypse. With its strangely dark subject matter but sunshine bassline it is a beautiful piece of dichotomy pop.
The album is not quite as invincible as 1000 Forms of Fear. Filler songs such as ‘Footprints’, ‘One Million Bullets’ and even the single ‘Unstoppable’ fail to be earworms. They feel at best to be facsimiles of ‘Big Girls Cry’ and ‘Chandelier’ but with none of the bittersweetness that made them popular. And although Sia’s diction has improved, it feels at times she forgets that sometimes a song needs to breathe. And singing the title/subject of the song several times between the first chorus and the second verse is suffocating.
[include_post id=”410377″]The biggest surprise is ‘Sweet Design’ that has a sample of ‘Thong Song’. Remember ‘Thong Song’? Yes that morbidly fascinating gem that we all had on the first So Fresh release in 2000? Thank goodness she sings this with her tongue in her cheek. Although it contains none of her traditional vocal acrobatics its pure juxtaposition with Sia’s style make it memorable. We have no idea who this was written for, but if you can think of anyone better than Nicki Minaj (this would be a perfect Nicki banger with one of Minaj’s own snappy raps added after the second chorus) please call us.
The album ends with plaintive bass opening the finale ‘Space Between’.
The thing you have to realize about Sia is her pop-songwriting career was originally all ballads, until ‘Diamonds’ came out. This song detailing realisation of how disconnected you are to a partner through the space between your bodies in a bed is performed almost operatic in sentiment while vocally Sia wails mournfully. It is a sublimely poignant song.
At the end of it all This Is Acting reads like a unique showreel of Sia’s songwriting variety. It is a bumpy listen as an album made of ‘would-have-been’ hits. But you cannot deny she’s prolific.
What saves the album from being a difficult listen is the magnitude of her voice, the strong singles of ‘Alive’ and ‘Bird Set Free’ as well as her oddball pop experiments with ‘Reaper’ and ‘Sweet Design’ (I’ll forgive her using Thong Song, because she is totally aware of its absurdity).
The final song however is why Sia is the most in-demand songwriter of this decade. She constructs absurdly human songs but delivers them in a pop-sized package easily digested but utterly memorable.
