Birdy is both an overnight success story – breaking through at 15 with her cut-glass cover of Bon Iver’s Skinny Love – and a maker of slow-burn hits: her singles have been streamed by the truckload but barely graze the charts (see: the ubiquitous tearjerker Keeping Your Head Up, which nevertheless peaked at No 57).
As such, she can count herself a commercial star who exists at some remove from pop culture’s nucleus. For her fifth album, however, the 27-year-old – real name Jasmine van den Bogaerde (she is Dirk Bogarde’s great-niece) – edges towards the zeitgeist, trading her hooky, all-purpose sentimentality for songs that draw on the current vogue for 80s-flavoured pop.
On opener Paradise Calling, she recreates the decade’s jerky, bombastic synthpop, yet her references from then on are less route one. Ruins I pairs stormy percussion with a lugubrious topline that evokes Echo and the Bunnymen. The excellent I Wish I Was a Shooting Star’s chorus apes Bowie’s lumbering pop melodies. Perhaps the Kate Bush allusions are a bit too on the nose – the imperiously spiking strings that kick off Raincatchers, Ruins II’s cantering rhythms and almost-falsetto vocal gymnastics – but as knock-offs go they’re first class.
Neither has she abandoned her trademark piano ballads, showcasing her stunningly lovely voice on the spotlessly beautiful Your Arms. Admittedly, you are left with the impression that some level of misty-eyed tweeness is non-negotiable with Birdy – especially lyrically – but don’t be tempted to write her off on that basis: Portraits’ sophisticated yet irresistibly melodic nostalgia trip transcends such qualms.
