KT Tunstall: Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon

The cowboy hat on the front is a bit of a giveaway: for her fourth studio album, Kate Victoria Tunstall has traded in the shiny pop of 2010’s Tiger Suit and embraced the spirit of Nashville. What’s more, the Edinburgh native seems perfectly at home in the Southern backwoods.
Recorded in two sessions, months apart, in Tucson – hence the double-pronged name – the result is a mixed bag. On one hand, you have some truly gorgeous songs, amongst the strongest she’s written, accompanied by a laidback country band that know their way around a bittersweet ballad blindfolded. There’s the smoky, late night jazz-inflected ‘How You Kill Me’, where KT’s voice sounds richer than before, the simple melancholy of ‘Yellow Flower Song’, and the traditional folk of ‘Old Man Song’. Similarly, ‘Honeydew’ is hauntingly old time and the Jewel-like ‘Invisible Empire’ is all softly strummed guitar, brush-led percussion, gentle piano and backing vocals so ethereal they’re barely there at all.
The flipside, however, is the super shiny production that turns decent tunes like ‘Carried’ or ‘Made Of Glass’ into AOR coffee-table fodder. The latter, in particular, veers so far into the middle of the road, it’s on first name terms with the cats’ eyes, as Tunstall stretches syllables far beyond their best before date.
It’s a pity, because there is a really good album in here trying to make itself heard: Tunstall’s writing and voice have the requisite torch and twang to carry it off, but they would’ve been better served with more spit and less polish.