Ingrid Michaelson’s Wikipedia entry describes her as an ‘alternative’ artist but, on her fifth album, the only things the Staten Islander seems the flip side of are subtlety and nuance. A sort of Tori Amos for Generation Twilight, her music is endlessly slick, rendered in a singing voice that feels custom-fitted for teary television montages (Grey’s Anatomy, One Tree Hill and Bones have all served as shop-windows for her). She can, to be fair, pen a decent tune. ‘Blood Brothers’ traffics in incredibly trite sentimentality – we are apparently ‘all the same’, ‘blood brothers’ if you will – but has a chorus so catchy you get swept up despite yourself. The same goes for ’The Sea’, which sounds like Regina Spektor upholstered with decent production. Culminating in a trippy wig-out, it’s practically the only moment she succeeds in keeping sappiness on a leash.
Elsewhere, ‘This Is War’ compares the breakdown of a relationship to, sigh, a military engagement; ‘End Of The World’ is written from the perspective of someone who’s just had their heart broken and informs us that romantic disappointment indeed feels like ‘the end of the world’. Fourteen year old girls who would quite like the idea of a troubled adolescence but are too cosseted to actually have one are, you suspect, Michaelson’s target demographic. For everyone else, Human Again represents a guilty pleasure, albeit one that goes down sweetly.