Just as you should never trust a band that takes five years to make an album, so should you be wary of those artists who can turn their work round in less than a year. And that goes doubly for the pop world. It smacks a little too much of living on borrowed time, of milking those 15 seconds for all they’re worth. So less than 18 months since the decidedly underwhelming ‘Footprints’, Holly Valance is back with a second crack of the whip.
State Of Mind is allegedly blessed with a new, edgier sound. What that actually means is that there are just more keyboards than ever. It’s probably meant to sound like Daft Punk – in reality it sounds like Howard Jones. The result is an album that manages to remove the few interesting elements of Valance’s music (the eastern slant to ‘Kiss Kiss’ for instance) in favour of producing twelve bland, identical tracks.
The singer herself seems to have had very little input – off suing her old manager and picking up that coveted GQ Woman Of The Year Award no doubt – and her vocals are buried so low in the mix that they are at times inaudible. No doubt there will be a degree of tabloid fuelled interest in all this but to be honest, once Samantha Mumba finally gets round to making music again, one dimensional no-hopers like Valance may as well pack up and go home.