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Sandi Thom
Smile...It Confuses People
(Viking
Legacy/Columbia)
First Appeared in
The Music Box, January 2007, Volume 14, #1
Written by John Metzger
Thanks to a cleverly orchestrated, low-budget marketing campaign, Sandi Thom
was propelled out of her obscure existence. Subsequently, she found herself in
the enviable position of watching her generational anthem I Wish I Was a Punk
Rocker (with Flowers in My Hair) bump Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy from the
top of the U.K. charts. Her full-length debut Smile...It Confuses People
was issued almost immediately thereafter, and it, too, met a similar fate of
instantaneous success. For all intents and purposes, the album is cut from the
same cloth that spawned fellow Scottish folk-rocker KT Tunstall’s Eye to the
Telescope, and opening cut When Horsepower Meant What It Said
virtually sounds like a sequel to Tunstall’s Black Horse & the Cherry Tree.
Elsewhere, Thom’s approach is a tad more varied, and where Tunstall dabbled in
Radiohead-esque textures, Thom draws from the Jackson 5 (Little Remedy)
and Joni Mitchell (Time).
Nevertheless, both Smile...It Confuses People and Eye to the
Telescope suffer from a similar weakness in that both Tunstall and Thom make
a few too many concessions to the mainstream. Thom’s Lonely Girl and
Castles, for example, are utterly generic folk-pop tunes that fail to leave
any semblance of a lasting impression, while What If I’m Right is aimed
directly at Michelle Branch’s audience. In truth, outside the nostalgic When
Horsepower Meant What It Said and I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (with
Flowers in My Hair), there’s nothing on Smile...It Confuses People
that fully works. For all of her whining about the lack of a vibrant youth
culture to which her music can provide the soundtrack, Thom does little to
cultivate one. Instead, she opts for the same crass commercialism as everyone
else.  ½
Smile...It Confuses People is available from
Amazon.com. To order, Click Here!
For Canadian orders, please
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For UK orders, please
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Ratings
1 Star: Pitiful
2 Stars: Listenable
3 Stars: Respectable
4 Stars: Excellent
5 Stars: Can't Live Without It!!
Copyright © 2007 The Music Box
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