Finnish songstress Sansa, along with regular collaborator Janne Oinas, returns with a varied third album blending folk and pop and even the occasional dash of electronica.
The album starts enticingly with the rocky ‘Waiting For The Sky’ followed by the vaguely First Aid Aid-esque ‘Black Brick Wall’. There are moments of beauty throughout, with ‘Rainbow Child’ and the title track sparkling in mid-album and ‘Is It You?’ a pleasing, if lightweight, finale.
Amid it all are two wildly contrasting covers of 80s Italian disco numbers. A version of Sabrina’s sex-heavy Boys (Summertime Love) is frankly rubbish but shows humour, along with a willingness to experiment which later yields possibly the album’s stand-out track. Valerie Dore’s ‘The Night’ is given a reworking which achieves Sansa’s stated aim of excavating a really quite lovely chorus previously buried beneath layers of synths (I paraphrase) and finds beauty in an unexpected place, in the manner of Michael Andrews and Gary Jules’ hit version of Tears For Fears’ ‘Mad World’.
Chilled out, beguiling and with an appealing sense of quirkiness thrown into the mix, like many of her Scandinavian contemporaries, Sansa deserves to blossom into one of 2012’s great discoveries.
Words: Tom White