Harlequin Review

The plan was to make a jazz record that is also a character study, with the arrangements curdling as the character comes apart. In practice it does neither well. The performances are theatrical rather than felt, since she is singing as someone else and the someone else is a cartoon, so Get Happy and That's Entertainment arrive with a knowing wink that drains the songs of any actual emotion. The production keeps reaching for menace with distortion and sour brass, and the effect is closer to a Halloween cabaret than to genuine unease.

Close to You is the only track where the concept and the material meet. The single original, Happy Mistake, is a decent ballad stranded in the wrong project. Everything about it is tied to a film that failed, and stripped of that context it becomes a well sung novelty album by an artist who can do this in her sleep and appears to have done. Skippable in a way almost nothing else of hers is.