When Welsh songbird Ellie Goulding topped the BBC Sound of 2010 poll back in January, electro-minded musos were all aflutter. It was a veritable rags to riches story – the rags being an acoustic guitar and a couple of mildly entertaining folk ditties, the riches being a few whopper disco beats and some production room trickery.
Unfortunately, the debut album Lights saw Goulding’s somersaulting vocals take a back seat to a whir of cascading dance throbs and bleeps. Some tunes worked – the stargazey ‘Guns And Horses’, blippy masterpiece ‘Wish I Stayed’ and the fiercely addictive ‘Under The Sheets’ sounded joyous and triumphant, despite being lyrically fueled by the hardly original topic of disappointing relationships. Sadly, a good portion of Lights was pure filler: airy digi-pop packed with pointless outer space noises.
Bright Lights is a hefty repackaging of Lights, with an extra seven tracks squished onto the end (think The Fame Monster, but with less Spanish). Newbie ‘Human’ is a clever discussion of mortality that allows Goulding’s quivering vocals to dominate the track, not the other way around. Elsewhere, ‘Home’ is a haunting power-ballad with a dynamite crescendo and ‘Animal’ bears a whopper European dance floor thump. Basically, this is Goulding at her best.
Until, of course, it gets to the obligatory cover version. I hate to state the obvious, but the music-loving public doesn’t particularly need another version of the heartbreaking Elton John classic ‘Your Song’. Produced by Mumford & Sons man Ben Lovett, the cover is based around a plodding piano line and has a suitably Mumford-esque stomp. In other words – it does the job on that John Lewis ad, but it’s not the most creative cover in the world, or even in the Goulding repertoire (see the ‘Tube for a pretty decent reworking of Coldplay’s ‘Don’t Panic’).
Yep, with Bright Lights you get the good and the bad of Lights – every unpleasant cliché (‘Why don’t you be the artist/ and make me out of clay?) and dud track as well as every money note and hallelujah! moment – plus half a dozen stellar new tunes. It’s these clever bonus numbers that suggest that if Goulding can just get the balance right for LP number two, we’ll have a serious pop star on our hands.
Key Track: ‘Guns And Horses’