Australian singer-songwriter, Sia Furler, claimed the Nº1 spot on the US album charts with her sixth studio album, “1000 Forms of Fear”, on the back of the success of her hit single “Chandelier”. After having spent time hiding away from the spotlight, writing hits for other artists, such as “Pretty Hurts” for Beyoncé, “Diamonds” for Rihanna and David Guetta’s “Titanium”, Sia has returned to the mic to record an album full of songs she simply could not let go of. The result – a pouring out of emotional maturity, honesty, vulnerability, humanity, creativity, all hidden beneath the layers of smart, consistent and powerful pop music.
“1000 Forms of Fear is pop music turned into pain, instead of vice versa, like we’re used to.” – Consequence of Sound.
Indeed, Sia uses every stunning and gripping element of pop to communicate her story, writing intimate songs mostly about pain and “delivering [that] great pain with even greater triumph” through her beautiful and athletic vocal cartwheels, melodic diversity and deep lyrical content.
Sia deals with matters of love and pain as well as matters of life and death, allowing herself to dabble into an array of songs, from power-ballads to pop-classics to rock-opera anthems, that give the album an overall sense of completeness and accomplishment.
Sia’s hit single and album-opening track, “Chandelier” beautifies the diary of an alcoholic, revealing every process of the desperate cycle, with its heedless highs and its despairing lows, through a triumphal pop production and a mind-blowing vocal performance. Indeed, “Chandelier” is the Rihanna song that had too much of Sia in it to become another “Diamonds.” – Consequence of Sound. The song’s music video, featuring an amazing performance by 11-year old Maddie Ziegler, victoriously colours the song in beauty, elegance, dynamism, energy and spirit.
“Big Girls Cry” is one of the most vulnerable and gorgeous songs on the album. It conveys the emotional journey into heartache, it’s “agony”, and the fear of loneliness. Sia’s vocals are coloured with pain and perfectly convey the lyrics “big girls cry when their hearts are breaking.”
While “Burn The Pages” contains all the qualities of an anthem and tells the story of a broken girl having to let go, “Eye of the Needle” is a stunning piano ballad about not wanting to let go. The chorus sings: “And you’re locked inside my heart/ And your melody’s an art/ And I won’t let the terror in, I’m stealing time/ Through the eye of the needle.” Sia’s versatile voice is glorified as she belts elastic vocals that oscillate between rock and opera.
“Hostage” lightens the mood set up by the album’s opening four tracks and turns the beat up a notch. The song sounds like an early Kings of Leon-meets-Amy Winehouse-meets-Gwen Steffani toe-tapping and upbeat pop track. Yet Sia brings everything back down again in “Straight for the Knife”, a hazy and atmospheric grand ballad that dips into the world of Lana Del Rey. Full of hurt, this song is about being tormented by a lover who knows your weaknesses and uses them to cut deep beneath the layers and inflict maximum pain. Here, Sia’s presence and wandering vocals are timeless yet ephemeral at once.
Despite all the pain caused by another, “Fair Game” looks into love’s mind games and Sia admits she doesn’t play fair either in her stinging piano and drum-heavy track, which is followed by the synth-pop Diplo-produced track, “Elastic Heart”, which features in the “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” soundtrack (read our blog here) and conveys all the bravery, strength and fearlessness embodied by Katniss Everdeen. The soundtrack reached Nº5 on the Billboard 200.
While “Free The Animal” is an electric pop track that attempts to break the dualities of love/hate and love/death, the cinematic and defiant track “Fire Meet Gasoline”, uses the song’s title as a metaphor to convey the connection and passion that can exist between two people and the pain that one endures when “the fire dies”. Sia admits, “Darkened skies/ Hot ash… Only smoke is left… Certain death.”
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While the cutting-edge and hazy track “Cellophane” makes a direct reference to mental instability, helplessness and the need for love as Sia piercingly sings the lyrics “I’d have fallen through the cracks without your love tonight… while I fall apart you’ll hide my pills again”, the album’s closing track “Dressed In Black” is about Sia defeating the feeling of loneliness, as a new-found-love brings her back to life. She sings: “I was dressed in black… You took my hand in yours/ You started breaking down my walls/ And you covered my heart in kisses.”
Apart from love’s unfair game, part of the pain Sia transmits comes from her experience with fame and the consequences that come with it. The world now knows that Sia is a “reluctant star” that hides her face from the public eye and rebels against the general concept of fame. Her record deal specifies nominal promotion.
In 2013, Sia published “My Anti-Fame Manifesto (By Sia Furler)”, in which she explains that “[she] and fame will never be married.”
Still, “1000 Forms of Fear” debuted at Nº1 on the Billboard 200 and sold 52,000 copies in the album’s first week of release. Kitty Empire (The Guardian) writes “1000 Forms of Fear” is “probably her best, the result of years of refining her art (yes, writing pop smashes is an art) and of feeling wretched and unloved despite all her success.”
Sia is, no doubt, a master songwriter and vocal brilliance – it’s clear to most that it’s Sia’s time to “shine bright like a diamond”.
To learn more about Sia, listen to her sincere and outspoken interview with Howard Stern:
Congratulations to Sia who just got married this past weekend to her boyfriend Erik Anders Lang. They tied the knot in Sia’s home town – Palm Springs, California
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