Australia's Sia knows a thing or two about instability. Zipping to fame with "Taken for Granted", an unlikely Prokofiev nod, and 2002's Healing Is Difficult, she appeared securely on track to pop stardom. But success left as suddenly as it came, driving her to rethink herself and her art. The result was Colour the Small One, a fragile and introspective song cycle inspired, in part, by the loss of an old beau in London to a car accident. When someone at HBO's "Six Feet Under" picked one of the album's tracks, "Breathe Me", to soundtrack the series' devastating last moments, Sia faced another jolt of celebrity.
Judging solely from her latest release, Lady Croissant, which gathers material from a show at New York's Bowery Ballroom, lasting celebrity may not be in the cards. Her fate seems tied to her vocal style, whether her Adelaide drawl is an asset or a liability. The studio work argues for the former, but these live recordings-- especially of Zero 7's "Destiny" and "Distractions"-- build a case for the latter. Innocent nouns like "mister" are reborn as "mizzu-ah-uh-ahh," translated into the mystic pidgin dream-language first discovered in Lindsay Lohan's correspondence. The studio version of "Distraction" includes the clear, clever plea to "Make Ms. Me, Mrs. You." But singing live, as a sort of public execution, Sia hangs, draws, and quarters the poor line. Again and again, the original sultriness is siphoned out. She covers Cher's "I Go To Sleep," written by Ray Davies and famously rendered by the Pretenders. Sia recreates the Pretenders' classy arrangements, but once again, she yanks apart Davies' poetry with her slurred, bathetic pronunciation.
Throughout the once-moving "Blow It All Away" and "Don't Bring Me Down", Sia's delivery seesaws between Rich Boy and Gregorian monks ("I don't wanna chuh-ah-eh-ay-unnnge"), on a continuum that never should have existed. As Sia confessed to an interviewer, this isn't her finest hour. The Bowery Ballroom show offered a starstruck (Michael Moore had pledged to attend), wine-drunk (she was starstruck), and lightly bloodied (an Easter egg hunt went awry, honestly) version of the woman. It just happened to be the one show they recorded.
Mercifully, two songs rescue this record from outright catastrophe. "Pictures", the single studio track here, was bankrolled by American Eagle, who saw Sia as the next Aryan face of collegiate abandon. The song is deceptively sunny, a great fit for the franchise's philosophy, but better still for Sia, whose strongest ballads wend between against-the-odds joy and an almost gothic fatalism. We get the sense we're hearing the real Sia, properly agonized. In the album's other success, "Lentil" sets quiet harmonies behind Sia's shy sing-speak and anguished outpourings. Amazingly, through the fog of elongated syllables and cut consonants, the story's wounded soul shines through. That these two songs are both new, and that these are the two that truly work, is the silver lining here. It's still distressing that Lady Croissant offers only a glimpse of Sia's abundant talent, a faded memory, instead of the widescreen vista fans were waiting for.
