Everybody's Angel

Angel Heart

Tanita Tikaram
Everybody's Angel
east west

No-one was really expecting her to re-emerge wearing a back-to-front baseball cap, Air Jordan 23s, chewing gum and shouting over car roofs at every passing schoolboy. But compared to its two predecessors, the tact that "Everybody's Angel" was recorded in New York is definitely reflected in its looser, more forthright and less precious persona. Indeed, it makes the close confines of the largely overlooked "The Sweet Keeper" (it's a measure of her success that an LP that sold a few million can still be deemed largely overlooked) seem almost stultifying.

While I'd hesitate to be patronising and say this is Tanita's grown-up LP, there's no denying that the thin line between self-assurance and complacency is navigated very deftly here. Furthermore, growing pains aside, while she hasn't completely lost the propensity for emotional self-analysis, many of the songs see her questioning her position rather than herself - "Everybody's Angel" could have very well been subtitled "Songs Of Love And Hate From A Room" if you catch the Cohen conundrum.

In the past, there's always been a tendency to over-interpret Tanita - her lyrics harbour that similar half-casual half-studied obliquely profound and at the same time nonsensical quality that someone like Michael Stipe delights in. On "Everybody's Angel", she's refined the art of giving nothing more than glimpses away.

"This Story In Me" is absurdly, unfathomably personal, its meaning locked away, almost lost under layer upon layer of innuendo. As ever, the best songs are the ones strung with barbs rather than wrapped in the soft cotton that smothered and absorbed much of the schizophrenic eroticism of "The Sweet Keeper". We're talking about the withdrawn dreamlike "Sunface" or the bereft despair of "I Love The Heavens", or the closely confessional "Some Time With Me", or even the closer "I'm Going Home", above which Helen O'Hara's trembling violin hovers like a threatening autumn storm cloud.

And while "going black" is the soul preserve of every muso who thinks they're going off, the use of brass and horns here connect a Celtic theme. Whether it's the sardonic gospel of "Deliver Me" or the "Too Busy Thinking 'Bout My Baby" horns of "Me In Mind". The only minor criticism lies with the continued use of Rod Argent and Peter Van Hooke whose occasionally tranquilised Van Morrison becking tracks threaten to anaesthetize the likes of "To Wish This" and "Mud In Any Water". On the whole though, "Everybody's Angel" spreads its wings far and wide. The coat and barnet may have gone, but the head and heart beneath still think and feel, beautifully.