Keren Ann Keren Ann by: Matt Smith Tue:20-Nov-07 Label: EMI Year: 2007 WB rating 59 out of 100

The eponymous fifth solo album from Israeli born Songstress Keren Ann Zeidel is a frustrating listen. It starts wonderfully: big guitar chords, ringing with reverb and sustain, crash in then slowly fade as a muffled kick drum pounds out a slow heartbeat and Zeidel quietly sings the ominous lines 'The lips of time, they kiss again / When I walk alone, into the night'. Opening track 'It's all a Lie' unfurls without any real melody, as thin organ notes and fractured guitar riffing create an unstable sea of noise, while the half whispered, half sung lyrics lament a hopeless yearning for a lost love and compliment the echoing emptiness at the core of the song. A powerful mood is successfully set right away, leaving the listener in hopeful anticipation of a dark, edgy album of haunting beauty that pushes further into territory that Zeidel began to explore on her last two records.

And then... well, then it launches into 'Lay Your Head Down', a rather upbeat, poppy love song, all jangly guitars and handclaps. It's a pleasant enough song, oddly reminiscent of the Velvet Underground, which becomes more intriguing as it goes on, with the introduction of harmonica and breathy, sampled backing vocals, but it completely kills the atmosphere created by the first track as effectively as flicking on fluorescent strip lighting at a candlelit dinner.

Next up is 'In Your Back', a slow, ordinary ballad, and thus the tone is set for an album of musical u-turns, sidesteps and feints that never really allows the listener to settle into it. Some kind of coherence is given by an overall downbeat, late night mood and the (admittedly very nice) lyrics preoccupied with the breakdown of relationships, but stylistically it remains a schizophrenic affair.

An eclectic sound isn't necessarily a bad thing, and some albums turn out to be the better for it. But what frustrates about Keren Ann is that, apart from the first track and to a certain extent the appealingly strange 'Liberty', the songs found on the record never really achieve what they set out to do or live up to the ideas behind them. There's a palpable sense that Zeidel is striving to go beyond 'pop' and create something stamped with her unique vision of dark beauty, but neither the minimalist chanteuse stylings on songs such as 'Where No Endings End' or the menacing stomp of 'It Ain't No Crime' quite hit the mark to become something truly memorable, while the misjudged electronic beats of 'Caspia' prove to be a puzzlingly awful way in which to close the album.

If nothing else, Keren Ann serves as an example that in order to become 'beautiful' a song needs an elusive something beyond the mere addition of strings, choral backing vocals or tinkling chimes. The most enjoyable tracks were those which had the most pop left in them, such as 'Between the Flatland and the Caspian Sea' and, if it were not for the unfortunate placing, 'Lay Your Head Down'.

All in all Keren Ann is a wholly disappointing album. Not because it's a particularly bad one (which it isn't), but rather because it's from a talented artist who has some excellent output behind her and still flashes some hugely promising sparks of inspiration which are never quite brought to fruition.