The cover of Susan Boyle's third album, "Someone to Watch Over Me," has the singer offering fans a soft smile, right alongside a title rendered in a gentle font that looks suspiciously like Comic Sans Italic. The very name of the record, referencing a Gershwin tune, sets you up for a possible collection of comfort-food standards.
But don't let any of this fool you: Boyle is really a goth in highlander-spinster’s clothing.
She made her mark on the world with “I Dreamed a Dream,” a song from “Les Miserables,” and two and a half years later, the frump-pop superstar still sounds deeply and profoundly… miserable. But her choice of material, if not her mood, has improved tenfold during the intervening depression, resulting in this surprisingly tasteful downer.
Aside from the titular Gershwin tune, which is heard only as a brief excerpt, there are no overfamiliar standards or show tunes here. Instead, she’s mostly doing a traditional take on contemporary material, much of it borrowed from rockers. She took that tack with last year’s eyebrow-raising cover of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” (because nothing says “Christmas album” like heroin), but the novel choices here seem less like slow-news-day bait and more appropriate for a 50-year-old’s funk.
With Depeche Mode and Tears for Fears chestnuts figuring into the mix, Boyle has made an album that hundreds of thousands of sixty- and seventy-somethings will be getting for Christmas, but that their grand-nieces may well enjoy more than the gift recipients… unless Grandma has a built-in appreciation for lines like “The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had.” (Thank you again for that one, Roland Orzabal.)
You could view the entire album as an exercise in lost or nearly abandoned faith, starting with the downbeat opener, “You Have to Be There,” which has Boyle questioning the existence of God in the very first verse. If that doesn’t strike her fans as a downer -- her first album did include “How Great Thou Art,” after all -- it’s because there’s an inevitable uplift to anything written by the redoubtable Benny and Bjorn, of ABBA fame. (The tune comes from a 1995 Swedish musical the pair co-wrote.) And guess what? Boyle even sounds a little bit like ABBA’s Agnetha, in her most serioso “Winner Takes It All” mode.
None of the other numbers have their roots in musical theater, so it’s soon time for her version of Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence,” in which all her Opera Lady instincts are toned down for a strange vocal in which she sounds like she’s waking up on the morning after a major bender. Boyle changes the melody ever so slightly, so that the “harm” in “Words… can only do harm” goes up instead of down, making it sound less sinister than Martin Gore’s original, if not a whole lot more uplifting.
Producer Steve Mac seems to want to emphasize Boyle’s vulnerability over her vocal indomitability.
