Charlotte Church - Charlotte Church

In case you were wondering if this album had any real artistic merit, there’s a bright red sticker on the front of the jewel case of this album, proclaiming ‘Includes JUST WAVE HELLO The Ford Millenium Anthem’.

“Just Wave Hello” is a weird damn mix of 90s pop-RnB percussion and the literal London Symphony Orchestra. The last minute is damn catchy, but the song does scream ‘advertisement music’, and it is the only song in that style on the album. The rest of this record is your standard crossover classical album featuring the thirteen-year old(!!!) Welsh soprano Church singing a scattershot of arias, sacred music, and various other hodgepodge. It’s an odd little album, and not in an endearing way.

Church’s voice is sweet, pure, and devoid of dramatic choice. She’s not really interpreting the music in any real way, all her rubato and diction choices are safe, and the primary emotion she aims to inspire in the listener is a sense of superiority for listening to classical music. Her operatic stuff is her obvious forte, and she can use those skills to force her way through classical church music, though it’s not quite a one-to-one match. Her version of “Summertime” is bizarre, with only the faintest of gestures towards jazz at all. On “She Moved Through The Fair” and “Men of Harlech” she tries to split the difference between her classical delivery and the original plain-language enunciation, and it falls quite flat.

Mastery of any style not the point of a crossover record. It needs to aim for a wide audience in order to get across when Church’s beautiful but naive instrument wouldn’t garner acclaim on its own from the classical crowd. It’s all the story of her discovery, and the financial oomph of the Ford corporation marketing push.

The inner booklet is full of (thankfully chaste) glamour shots in clothes someone else picked out superimposed on images of pastoral Britain. The purple and green speckled marble background on the inside screams late 90s, but the layout gets the job done. Everything feels so eerie and manufactured. Yeah, I don’t know what else to say here. This is not for me.

Charlotte Church by Charlotte Church is a bad album, and I don’t like it.