Island
Pop, 2009

Wow, that is some creepy photo on the CD cover. In a way, poor Natalie Imbruglia can never live up to the success of her debut single Torn, but I have to give her credit for not creating another song similar to that single in order to rejuvenate her career. Instead, she keeps doing the kind of low key music she obviously enjoys.

And low key describes Come to Life perfectly. There is the beautiful introspective ballad Fun, which sees Ms Imbruglia reminiscing in a bittersweet manner over a broken relationship. She is still hurting over the end of the relationship, but she wants to remember the good times they had had nonetheless. Scars is haunting song with a chorus that sticks to the brain no matter what. I can easily imagine how cathartic it must be to get drunk and sing out loud to this song after a broken relationship, heh.

But it’s not all doom and gloom here. Twenty is a mid tempo song with a chorus that could lift one’s spirits when one is blue. Lukas is a pretty melancholic song if you listen to the words closely, but it has a bouncy and upbeat-sounding chorus to mask the woes.

Come to Life is not an album full of instantly catchy songs, it’s an album to listen to when one wants inspiration for passive aggressive letters to ex-boyfriends and such. That’s not necessarily a bad thing given how good some of the songs here are.