From The New York Times
June 12, 2006
Music Review
KT Tunstall Bridges the Distance Between New York and Scotland
By NATE CHINEN
On the surface the ascent of the Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall suggests a distinctly contemporary success story. Ms. Tunstall had her breakthrough in Britain in 2004, as a last-minute substitute on a late-night BBC music show. Her first album, released a few months later, went on to become one of the 10 best-selling albums in Britain last year, the biggest by a female artist, and the basis for a Brit Award.
When the album, "Eye to the Telescope" (Virgin), was released in the United States early this year, it came with a major promotional campaign. The engine is still humming. Last month Ms. Tunstall's lead single, "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree," appeared on the finales of both "Will & Grace" (in a one-hour series signoff) and "American Idol" (in a performance by the runner-up, Katharine McPhee). On Friday afternoon Ms. Tunstall visited Macy's Herald Square to kick off a series of appearances for Origins, the cosmetics brand.
Several hours later Ms. Tunstall seemed a shade ambivalent about all this hoopla as she led a five-piece band at Webster Hall. Spiking her onstage banter with sporadic brogue-inflected profanity, she did her best to seem like an irrepressible, unruly rocker.
That sense was strongest on "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree," a Surrealist confessional romp. Ms. Tunstall used an effects pedal to build the guts of the song in layers: first the thump of her boot on the floorboards, then a hooting cry, then the strum of her acoustic guitar. It was a simple but effective trick. All the pieces added up to a sturdy undercarriage for Ms. Tunstall's full-throated vocals.
Most of her other songs were more conventionally tuneful. Musically they harked back about a decade, evoking early Radiohead ("False Alarm"), Alanis Morissette ("Another Place to Fall") and, less expectedly, Seal ("Heal Over"). Ms. Tunstall sang them all with conviction, her voice alternately silvery or stormy. Her gusto lent gravity to her lyrics, which were often about bridging emotional distances.
On "Miniature Disasters" the distance was within herself: between the ambitious side of her personality and the vulnerable side. "I must be my own master," she sang, "or a miniature disaster will be the death of me." Ms. Tunstall may not have meant those lines as a comment on her surging career, but they provided a handy parallel.
So did her first encore, "She Don't Use Jelly." As Ms. Tunstall is surely aware, that song became a chart single for the Flaming Lips in 1995 after it was featured on "Beverly Hills, 90210." It was the only such hit for that band, which has since kept all of its quirks intact. If Ms. Tunstall wants to carve a similar path, she seems resourceful enough to pull it off.
