Sophie Ellis-Bextor
Trip the Light Fantastic

THE REVIEW

Scattered in this musical – and international – battlefield, which can be circumscribed as pop music, there are still delightful personalities who unfortunately are not able to validly convey the echo of their productions, whether it's due to today's trend of aesthetic-visual exaggeration, or because of record companies behind them absolutely incapable of managing such talents. This is how some artists, who started with great success, top-ten hits, and skyrocketing fame, find themselves on their second studio work having to deal with a fickle and dissenting audience, thus forced to adorn the roles of meteors to be relegated into increasingly small and miserable niches.

Sophie Ellis-Bextor unfortunately is part of this lineup: a sort of charming UK version of Kylie Minogue, tending towards sobriety and rational simplicity in terms of costumes, sounds, and background scenography, Sophie started with a trio of hits (Take Me Home, Murder On The Dancefloor, Get Over You), as well as with the debut album Read My Lips back in 2002, a year when disco-dance atmospheres were already lit up with the successes of the Australian "counterpart." However, with the subsequent works, the English artist has not been able to obtain the dazzling numbers of the first album anymore, reaching the current status of indie-performer with the latest Make a Scene. Nevertheless, putting aside the mere commercial-financial analysis of her career, Ellis-Bextor has not thrown the quality of her productions into the trash, rather she has managed to free herself from the exclusivity of pop-disco of Read My Lips towards increasingly varied and exquisite achievements and towards sophisticated and refined sounds.

Trip The Light Fantastic, dated 2007, is probably the pinnacle of this unmissable "quest for heterogeneity" by the lovely Sophie: a work with contrasting hues and sounds, an authentic mix of retro electropop (with a perpetual gaze towards the eighties season), new-wave, disco-dance, melodic rock, funky, and soul. As multiple as the sound catalog drawn for the occasion is, the semblance of musical "mixed-fry" is ephemeral: twelve tracks slipping away in the simplest and most straightforward way possible, without too many auditory aberrations and disruptions, a handful of songs where the combination between Sophie's sumptuous voice and the tinted melodies work perfectly.

The album opening is entrusted to the pleasant dynamism of the first single Catch You, an uptempo electronic-rock with evergreen-retro outlines that makes way for Me And My Imagination, direct reference to the Ellis-Bextor disco-dance, queen of a 2000s Saturday night fever. Then we move on to the sensual electropop mischief of If I Can’t Dance, to the folk-military march of frivolous synths in If You Go, and to the dark house-techno winks of indispensable 80s inspiration of China Heart, enriched by a breakdown of full-bodied strings.

With Today The Sun’s On Us, a romantic slow, the chapter related to the pop-rock crafted slow/midtempo begins, a direction particularly noticeable in the evergreen soundtrack atmosphere of The Distance Between Us, in the merry doo-wop of Love Is Here, as well as in the retro-funky cabaret accompaniment of Only One. It all closes with the romantic-passionate dance elevation similar to a final love culmination of What Have We Started.

Although deprived of the grandiose accompaniments reserved for much more vaunted mainstream-pop personalities, Sophie Ellis-Bextor's third studio album astonishes (and quite a bit) for its simplicity and creative rigor, for the varied (yet not blatantly copied) inspirations and for the balance derived from the aforementioned mix of sounds, comparable to the unappreciated elegance of the "neighbor" X by Kylie Minogue, also released in 2007. For those who do not love pop (or rather do not appreciate its background aesthetic machinations), this is probably the album needed to reassess a genre far too unduly generalized and terribly inflated.