Sia, Colour the Small One

3 / 5 stars 3 out of 5 stars.
Colour the Small One by Sia

Sia Kate Isobelle Furler's lengthy full name inevitably calls Dido to mind - so it's scant surprise to find that she practises a similar strain of nice-girl blood-letting. In fact, Sia's first hit (a one-off top 10 in 2000) preceded Dido's debut, so it's anyone's guess why she's not the one breathily counting her dosh at the top of the charts.

At her most ruminative, you would never even know she's Australian (her father played in Men at Work). Sia was originally launched as an R&B turn, but this album, her second, sets things straight: she is a wispy romantic with jazzy affinities and a heroic lisp. Once past the opening clutch of small, grasping ballads, which all the electro-spaciness at the producer's disposal can't make cool, Colour the Small One unfurls into an unexpectedly endearing thing.

Her melodramatic premise, that love will kill you if you let it, receives elegiac treatment on The Church of What's Happening Now, and a jazzed-up spaciousness on Where I Belong. This could be the soundtrack to some of the new year's mopiest moments.