Diana Krall has made a career — for better or for worse — in interpretive work, typically focusing on songbook retreads with very little tread left. It’s where her biggest fame lies, even if her original work (and even more edgy, lesser-known items like those in 2012’s Glad Rag Doll) was always more interesting.
News that she was returning with a covers project, and with former 1980s-era Chicago producer David Foster no less, signalled another pay day for Krall more than any artistic breakthrough. Her voice, as playful as it is sensual, as pillowy as it is hip, largely carries her along on Wallflower, even when the gussied-up material simply can’t.
In a mild twist, Krall focuses this time on more recent pop songs, but Foster’s string-laden, geriatric production style gives them a strangely disaffected placidity — trying, but failing, at a gentle balance she achieved on a boss nova record from a few years ago. Instantly familiar and kind of mushy, songs by the Eagles (“I Can’t Tell You Why”), Jim Croce (“Operator”) and 10cc (“I’m Not in Love”) probably wouldn’t have given Diana Krall much push back even in a more challenging situation. Foster, and this probably comes as no surprise, doesn’t craft a challenging situation.
Wallflower, instead, is either teeth-splinteringly tasteful, or cloyingly banal. Diana Krall is better than these arrangements, better than this album, better than she’s too-often presented — even if those are precisely the records that seem to sell the most.
Not that Wallflower, due on February 3, 2015 via the Verve Music Group, passed without its brief moments of fizzy lucidity. Diana Krall, even while fighting her way out of these gauzy constraints, is too interesting for that. There are glimpses of pleasant darkness in Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” and devastating hurt in the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’.” I recognized the engulfing regret within the Paul McCartney original “If I Take You Home Tonight,” thrilled to the flickering fire in her take on Bob Dylan’s title track.
Waiting for those moments, amid David Foster’s gorgeous tedium, is hardly worth it, though.
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