Sia Furler has spent the past five years in a slow motion recoil from the entertainment industry’s cult of celebrity – which is interesting, since she wasn’t really a celeb in the first place. Rather, she is a highly-rated writer for hire, with collaborators including Rihanna, Katy Perry and Beyonce. Simply being in the orbit of a-listers of this calibre has, it seems, been enough to turn her off media exposure for life (she told her record label she would not give any interviews to promote her music, though she has since had extensive chinwags with the New York Times and National Public Radio).
As a singer she seems to have inherited the traits of many of the artists with whom she has worked. ‘Chandelier’, the lead single off her sixth album, is a Katy Perry-esque squirt of bubblegum, with a goose-stepping bass and stomping melody. Later, she sounds a little like RiRi on ‘Big Girls Cry’; and she summons a respectable approximation of Beyonce’s Valkyrie sass via ‘Elastic Heart’.
The cover of the album is a shot of Sia, her likeness blanked out so that only the outline of her hair remains. Undoubtedly this was intended as a metaphor for her desire to remain faceless in a world obsessed with celebrity’s personal lives. But it also provokes a question: is the curious emptiness at the heart of this record really what Sia intended?
OUT NOW.