Katie Melua, Album No. 8, review: an admirable divorce album free from recrimination

“I think we’ve given love too much airtime,” Katie Melua sings, slightly disingenuously, on a new album that tackles the eternal subject from oblique angles. “You know the kind of songs I’m meaning,” she notes on Airtime, which finds the Georgian-British singer-songwriter gently complaining about a preponderance of slushy ballads evoking feelings she’d rather keep at bay.

“Oh, turn it down / Too much love is all around.” I don’t suppose it’s an intentional reference to the summer of 1994 when Melua would have been just 10 years old and Love Is All Around was number one for 15 weeks. But anyone who suffered under the reign of Wet Wet Wet may appreciate the sentiment.

Melua’s seven-year marriage to World Superbike racing champion James Toseland recently ended in divorce. Unfortunately for singer-songwriters, it is a bad turn of events that often brings out the best in them. Divorce albums tend to be dramatic affairs, where sadness and bitterness jostle, spilling (in Bob Dylan’s memorable phrase) Blood on the Tracks.

Melua, however, is almost at pains to maintain emotional distance and avoid recrimination. Opening track Love Like That sees her conjuring images of wild passion with a pessimistic twist (“It’s a burning fire / It’ll be a wreck”) building to the question “how do you make a love like that last?” as if resigned to failure. On Your Longing Is Gone, Melua evokes autumnal images to convey changing emotions. On the final track, Remind Me To Forget, she refrains from laying blame for love’s failings, instead noting “There’s seven reasons why / And yours are different from mine.” This may be the world’s first No Fault Divorce album.

Even more than the almost scrupulously fair lyrical content, it is the languid melodies, unhurried rhythms and gentle balance of acoustic instruments with richly orchestrated strings that convey Melua’s self-composure. Producer Leo Abrahams is a classical guitarist and composer whose own work tends towards the ambient and experimental, and his spacious, almost weightless arrangements really hit the sweet spot.

When first spotted as an 18-year-old BRITS school student by producer Mike Batt in 2003, Melua was singing a tribute to the late Eva Cassidy. Her voice has always essayed that kind of steady coolness, aspiring to a distilled sweetness and purity of note rather than the melismatic pyrotechnics so prevalent in contemporary female pop singing. Squarely aimed at mature audiences rather than her own generation, her old-fashioned style has brought Melua seven consecutive top ten UK albums. At 36, you might say she has reached an age and experience that suits her premature maturity.

Emphasising the almost clinical clarity of her latest release, Melua’s eighth album is entitled Album No. 8. It would be wrong, though, to suggest an absence of feeling. Standout song, English Manner, constructs a spooky narrative of a mistress haunted by the ghostly presence of her lover’s ex, that rings all the stronger for understatement. This is a laidback album, drawing on the dreamy Seventies milieu of Laurel Canyon with a touch of the easy listening sumptuousness of Burt Bacharach. It is about the ways lovers drift apart, evoking the fall of Autumnal leaves rather than blood on the tracks.

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