Sandi Thom: The Pink and the Lily
RCA/SonyBMG
By Andrew P Street
Pity the poor one hit wonder that's forced to come up with a second album. It's not that Ms Thom is bad at what she does so much as she's hideously, overwhelmingly average. You'd doubtlessly recall that she came to prominence via a spirited novelty song - the buttock-clenchingly-awful ‘I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker (With Flowers In My Hair)' - but while artists like Beck and Radiohead managed to parlay their brief novelty moment on the pop-culture radar into a lifelong career, Thom failed to find an audience (memorably drawing a grand total of zero punters to a Melbourne MySpace Secret Show). People are not going to be drawn in by The Pink And The Lily for one straightforward reason: it's not very good.
‘Beatbox' puts a drum loop under her vaguely country songcraft, although she does try to show rock'n'roll chops on songs like rubbish first single ‘The Devil's Beat' and the jauntily annoying ‘Remote Control Me'. But it's not until the second track - the drab ‘Shape I'm In' - that it suddenly become clear: that rapid strumming, that tuneful but unspectacular voice: she's the Lisa Loeb for the 00s, destined to be a pop-culture footnote for the rest of her life as she traipses about the planet playing ‘...Punk Rocker...' while attempted to drum up interest in her new self-released album. And self-released they will be because there's no way in hell she's keeping her recording deal after this tanks, no matter how ardent are the thankyous in her liner notes. Hopefully her inevitable future career doing vocals for bank commercials will keep her too busy to make more albums as time-wastingly dull as this. Andrew P Street
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