If you count yourself as a pop fan, there’s a good chance that Sia Furler’s fingerprints are all over something you love. Formerly of Zero 7, the Australian is currently one of the world’s most sought-after hitmakers, with her midas touch yielding major songs for Beyonce, Rihanna, Katy Perry and Britney Spears in recent years.
‘1000 Forms Of Fear’ is her sixth solo record and one that has, to date, complied with her strict anti-fame stance. The cover, simply displaying a shock of trademark blonde hair, exemplifies her aversion to the spotlight, just as recent magazine covers and TV slots have done. This is an artist in it for everything but the trappings of celebrity - even if the Sydney Morning Herald has dubbed her ‘Australia’s Empress Of Pop’.
In truth, ‘1000 Forms Of Fear’ is a album shot through with dispatches from a war with fame that once led to thoughts of suicide. Furler’s imparted plenty of herself lyrically, filling each melody with echoes of depression and dangerous dependence, both personal and chemical. She rarely grants interviews and won’t appear in videos, but this is not a record that lacks in personality, or depth for that matter.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it traverses popular haunts for modern pop artists, covering lung-busting power ballads, upbeat guitar melodies and complex, understated R&B.
Chandelier, the lead single, explodes into its chorus in a manner similar to Perry at her most overwrought before Furler’s escalating falsetto carries it somewhere new. Similarly, Straight For The Knife unfurls a deceptively sophisticated central melody that prevents it from ever becoming by-the-numbers. Big Girls Cry, meanwhile, is capable of performing a similar trick.
Hostage, propelled by jabs of keys that could belong to a mid-era Eels record, spins an elaborate metaphor of lover as prisoner around a hook catchy enough to burrow its way through your skull in a matter of moments.
If some songs - Burn The Pages, Eye Of The Needle, the early section of Fire Meet Gasoline - are unremarkable, Furler’s delivery is never less than engaging. There is a sense here of a master at work, even if her discipline is one that many choose to ignore out of a sense of prudishness or misplaced indie cred. Sia doesn’t want your adoration, but she’s demanding to be heard.
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