Drifting off coast

Natalie Imbruglia

White Lilies Island

BMG Records

… Natalie Imbruglia

White Lilies Island

BMG Records

Today’s female pop artists fall into two categories: the tarts and the tartistes, and Natalie Imbruglia is doing her damnedest to get into the latter camp.

After her gigantic worldwide hit “Torn,” Imbruglia couldn’t follow it up with a similar hit from her first release Left of the Middle. Keenly aware that she doesn’t have Britney Spears’s Lolitarific allure or Kylie Minogue’s dancefloor cred, she tries to go in a completely different direction with her sophomore effort White Lilies Island.

Perhaps trying to appeal to the erudite, Nihilist aesthete with a secret taste for intellectual pop, Imbruglia crafts a second album full of phrases like “This dichromatic vision/of one who does not care” and “It thrilled me to starvation/And I don’t understand.”

But instead of creating a cohesive portrait of the artist that shows her various facets