Julia Fordham - Porcelain CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

and arranges them like so many flowers. As a result, the surfaces of these songs are almost intoxicating enough to distract you from their weaknesses.

With its downbeat mood and nonstop melancholy, Porcelain has less to do with rock than with cabaret music. Some of these songs could become lounge standards, given their dramatic lyrics and elaborate melodies, which sink in gradually, then linger. In her lyrics, the British singer avoids clichés through unabashed overstatement – with hit-or-miss results. "Now our love is lying like some troubled land/Now you are my Ireland and I'm your 'Nam," she swoons on "Manhattan Skyline." Solemn duds like this are far more frequent than "Island," a testament to female friendship.

But it's Fordham's coproduction, which turns despair into luxury, that defines her vision and pushes the album over the top. The influences she incorporates nearly dissolve inside a stately ambience reminiscent of John Martyn and Bryan Ferry. To provide a setting for "Genius," an environmental warning about the abuse of South American rain forests, she adapts a Brazilian rhythm and sings two verses in Portuguese. Like a missionary, Fordham dresses up music intended for public celebration as though readying it for church; the mock-African chorus arrangement and percussion in "Lock and Key" wouldn't fluster the queen. And she isn't modest about displaying her striking falsetto-to-baritone range. On the title track, she steals a chorus melody from the Carpenters' "Superstar," and on "For You Only for You," she makes a pass at a jazz vocal.

Is Porcelain some kind of uniquely British version of the blues? Is the pale imagery of the album title meant to be ironic? Is Fordham a postmodern Carly Simon? A Barbra Streisand for the Nineties? Has she just listened to too many Laura Nyro records? With its curious match of adolescent lyricism and contemporary musical structure, Fordham's second album is full of foolish and beautiful extremes. (RS 578)

ROB TANNENBAUM