NIOBE - White Hats

Having slept off the hangover from the success of "Voodooluba", Yvonne Cornelius, aka Niobe, is back. That aforementioned 2004 record had been received as something like the definitive statement of the German/South American artist's glitch-pop, the one in which she'd managed to give fully-realized, high-quality form to her harmonic deconstructions. Having reached that point of completion, the question then became: retrace the same path, or do something different?

Her new "White Hats" takes the second route, pushing the electronics into the background and aiming for greater accessibility, though without abandoning her roots - perhaps more out of ingrained skill than deliberate choice (Cornelius's head and hand remain those of a musician who works "with sounds" and "with little noises", not those of a classically-minded singer-songwriter). It's hard to pin a genre on the record: you could call it "pop" to flag the greater emphasis on melody, but there's plenty of spillover (touches of soul, a dash of jazz and bossa nova, the odd dip into dance).

So the record casts around for various solutions, but - and here's the crux of it - it suffers from excessive artifice, with craft smothering imagination and trying, unsuccessfully, to make up for a lack of inspiration. In the first two-thirds, only two tracks really convince: "Surround Your Hover", a tropical tableau, a breath of summer with flute counterpoint, building ever more elegantly as the minutes pass with bursts of organ (credit to the deft hand of Wechsel Garland); and the title track "White Hats", an evocative siren song that's a touch fragile - though that, admittedly, is also something of a virtue.

The rest limps along. Case in point: the scratchy "Drei Zinner", in which Niobe dresses up as CocoRosie with greater, failed (jazz-tinged) ambitions; the watery whisper of "Phosphorous", with a seductive surface and precious little exciting substance underneath; and the existential guitar figure with altered vocals on "Well and Wise", which comes off dull and plodding rather than absorbing and expansive.

It happens, though, that just when boredom has gained the upper hand and is coasting to an easy victory in its own private match, a jolt shakes Niobe and her collaborators out of their passivity. "Shirocco & Mistral", dreamy and haunted by ghosts, with drum hits over gusts of wind; "In the Sun", guitar and voice with a Banhart-esque flavour that radiates well-being; and "None But One", with its classically tinged piano motifs (Garland again, the only one to score, nailing three out of four and confirming the fine form of his latest "Easy"), offer moments of beauty in a record that had been sliding toward bare mediocrity.

So, a bit of redemption, though in the end five out of thirteen isn't enough. Once the media buzz dies down, few will remember Niobe's "White Hats".

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22/06/2006