Sia, This is Acting review: a thrillingly intimate album that's so much more than just off-cuts
This album of tracks written for other stars makes you wish Sia Furler kept every song for herself
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Your support makes all the difference.You'll know the name of Sia Furler, but you certainly won't know the face. That's because the Australian songwriter, having made her name as a one-woman hit factory, has pursued her own solo career with a quite literal self-effacement, shielding herself with a massive fringe in public. Her latest album takes the modesty yet further: a collection of off-cuts originally written for other stars, its title compels the listener to see her music as good craftmanship, no more, no less.
The paradox is that this self-professedly impersonal album should feel more thrillingly intimate than many a supposedly soul-baring effort. That's thank to the remarkable instrument that is Furler's voice: huge but fragile, fearlessly ragged and wild, seemingly a conduit of a tumultuous past that has included drug addiction and mental health issues, it perfectly counterpoints her songs' robust construction in a way that makes you wish she kept every song she wrote for herself. Take "Bird Set Free" and "Alive", both ginormo self-empowerment anthems written for Adele: but where her soulful sophistication may have rendered them merely stirring, Sia produces something more complex, battle-cries from a volatile soul.
If skyscraping balladry is her metier though, then elsewhere Sia proves she can lend her expertise to lighter fare: "Move Your Body", written for Shakira, is a stuttering dancefloor magnet, while the loping, reggae-inflected "Cheap Thrills" sounds like the old-school Rihanna hit it should have been. Ending with the startlingly slurred break-up song "Space Between", if this is acting, then what would she be like doing it for real?
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