KT Tunstall: Drastic Fantastic : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Set the way-back machine for 1997! Smash Mouth and Third Eye Blind and Primitive Radio Gods are the rock stars of the future. People are still walking around saying, “You are so money, baby!” Nobody's heard of Napster, reality TV or Britney. Puff Daddy is all over the airwaves rapping, “Ten years from now we'll still be on top,” which turned out to be half true. And everybody complains about how conservative Bill Clinton is -- can't wait for the real Democrats to take over in 2000.

So let's wade through the Lilith Fair parking lot and ask everybody the same question: Who's still going to be famous in 2007, Alanis or Gwen? Trust me, everybody's going to give the same answer -- we'll get ninety-nine Alanises for every Gwen. Everybody knows Alanis is the crest of a patchouli-scented, Lilith-sponsored future for femme folk rockers. That Gwen girl, she's just a flash in the pop pan -- outlasting Alanis? That'd be like predicting Green Day would stay famous longer than Pearl Jam! Talk to the hand!

Ten years after, KT Tunstall is the kind of Alanis who gets over -- the kind who borrows a lot of pop guile from Gwen. Her second album, Drastic Fantastic, would fit seamlessly into 1997, and it's easy to imagine “Hopeless” or “Saving My Face” getting played on Lilith-era radio in between Paula Cole, Fiona Apple and Meredith Brooks hits. It once seemed there'd be a lot of Tunstalls right about now, but she's the one who's getting it done, tempering her folkie style with professional pop smarts. The thirty-two-year-old Scottish singer-songwriter bristles at comparisons to Dido, but the two really do sound similar, which means they both sound a lot like Sarah McLachlan -- especially the signature vocal tic of jumping up into a midvowel falsetto to symbolize emotional leaps contemplated yet not taken. If Tunstall hates being compared to Dido, it probably has less to do with sonics than Dido being yesterday and Tunstall being today; it's a musical niche, and Tunstall occupies it smartly. Like her surprise hit debut, Eye of the Telescope, it's high-gloss folk pop, confessional in form if not in content, crafted with intelligent attention to every detail.

Eye of the Telescope was the kind of slow-burning hit that isn't supposed to happen anymore -- ignored on its release, it picked up fans slowly, way past the point where the usual boom-or-bust pop model would have called for pulling the plug. Some fans complained the album was overproduced, glossing over the rough edges Tunstall shows in concert. Yet the glitzy sound of Telescope had a lot to do with why it stuck around, and Drastic Fantastic is built along the same principles. Both albums push the grabby, annoying songs up front, yet they become more relaxed and enjoyable about halfway through, as “Hopeless,” “Someday Soon” and “I Don't Want You Now” expand into build-and-surge pan-Euro pop ballads in the mode of Coldplay or the Corrs.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that Tunstall's producer, Steve Osborne, came up through disco, making his bones with Happy Mondays and New Order. Like a great dance track, these tunes are constructed with a sense of pace and scale. All the songs are sharply structured, none dragging on too long or meandering too slowly; they all have hooks, like the hand claps in “Hold On” or the keyboard-flute frills in “Paper Aeroplane.” Everything sounds big, yet every track has specific identifying touches. Even the one called “Beauty of Uncertainty” doesn't vague out.

Tunstall wisely avoided doing a blatant sequel to her breakthrough hit, “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree.” The first single, “Hold On,” is a Latin-flavored ditty that doesn't really cut it, but “I Don't Want You Now” is the catchiest thing she's written yet, piling up layered overdubs of briskly strummed acoustic guitars, as Tunstall sends poison kisses to a boyfriend who tried to tie her down and stitch her up. Unlike the average Lilith-era songwriter, she never pretends she's on the verge of falling apart, which is one of her attractions.

Tunstall's sound definitely flashes back to 1997 -- the massed acoustic guitars, the carefully controlled catches in the voice, the smooth beats. But the way she puts a song together is markedly different from the other singers she resembles -- it's hard to imagine Sarah McLachlan or Jewel getting in and out of “Hopeless” in three minutes, breezing through so much small-town malaise (“I'm a hopeless follower of anything/To take me away from this hole in the ground”) with such succinct power chords. She knows it's 2007, not 1997, and she sings as if she wants your attention right now.