New circumstances, similar failings. On their third album Little Birdy invoke the sound of vintage African-American pop music, peppering the songs with doo-wop harmonies, buoyant Motown basslines and tear-laden strings. Coming after their 2006 long player, Hollywood, where the tracks were liberally daubed with pliant '80s keyboard sounds, it makes you wonder if Katy Steele and her bandmates have the magpie gaze of fashion designers who fasten onto an inspiration for the latest season and then move on to the next trend when the show is order and the orders have been filled.

What do sounds turned into archetypes by almost half a century of play suggest when referenced now? Certainly not what they once did. Any social significance, let alone energy, has naturally drained away, simply leaving the shared satisfaction of an easily recognised reference. This is comfort food music and it fits the songs on Confetti because it plays to their lack of definition and detail.

This is a record of opening gambits that are never seen through. “My brother he taught me how to fly/My papa he taught me how to cry,” runs the much quoted first couplet, but it’s a striking claim that the album chooses never to revisit, let along explore. Shouldn’t that be a starting point, not a full stop? Across 11 tracks Steele dashes off claims and queries and she’s at naturally at ease not pursuing them. “I have seen no place like this,” she declares at the opening of 'Stay Wild', but she has neither the curiosity nor compulsion to map it either physically or emotionally.

As pop songs these tracks are reassuring and cozy – the craftsmanship is reliable. But the more Steele sketches herself at the centre of their vague emotional outlook – seemingly wronged in love on 'Into My Arms', then pledging fealty to a sleeping lover on 'Everyone is Sleeping' – the more she sounds like a ghost haunting someone else’s songs. The more totems of truthfulness she opts to play, the more heartfelt yearning she exhibits, the quicker she disappears into the ether. The merely anodyne has a sluggish weight and sour aftertaste, but on Confetti Little Birdy come and go without leaving so much as a fingerprint.

by Craig Mathieson