Lying in bed and staring at the ceiling while trying to fall asleep is a good time for introspection. Whether they are positive or negative, about what happened that day or long-term issues, thoughts need to make the mind weary before it can rest. Ethereal and melodic, Sia’s Some People Have Real Problems provides a perfect soundtrack for this moment of inward thinking. It’s an album that can lull you to sleep, not put you to sleep.
Real Problems is Sia’s third LP but first on Monkey Puzzle Records, having switched due to her disappointment in the promotion of her previous album. The switch does her well, as one can find her latest album sold and played in Starbucks across the nation. To entice you to buy the physical CD rather than an electronic version, Monkey Puzzle includes online exclusives offered by registering the CD on your computer. The four tracks available to download are worth checking out; however, the streaming remix of “Day Too Soon” sounds like listening to the original song while trying to fall asleep on a beach, tripping on LSD.
Sia started out as a member of an acid-jazz band in Australia and moved to the U.K. to try and find success. There, through a number of collaborations (including providing vocals for Zero7), she increased her notoriety and legitimacy as an artist. Her main breakthrough came when her single “Breathe Me” was featured on the epic finale of the HBO series Six Feet Under in 2005. Real Problems is Sia’s first album as a widely-exposed artist and she delivers.
The opening track, “Little Black Sandals,” sets the pace for the album, featuring downtempo verses delineating Sia’s struggle with breaking free from a tumultuous relationship. She showcases her vocal range by changing notes on a single word and makes it clear that she can do more than just jazz-lounge volume and tempo. Even though Sia proclaims “these little black sandals are walking me away/these little black sandals are heading the right way,” physical distance doesn’t mean emotional ties are broken, and twelve more tracks on the album say so.
The theme of trying to get away from emotions carries over into the single off the album, “Day Too Soon” (I’ve been running all my life/ I ran away/ I ran away from good.) One of the more emotional tracks on the album at face value, “Day Too Soon” serves as a buildup of mixed regret for the past and hope for the future. Sia rasps her way through some of the verses (this rasping is more prevalent in “Lentil”) as if her coping mechanism (aside from music) is a pack of Camels.
Sia employs a host of backing vocalists on Real Problems including Beck, who is featured on the track “Academia.” Cleverly titled, constructed and rhymed, “Academia” suggests that love can at times by as simple as one plus one, but at times as complex as an advanced calculus problem. Sia laments: “oh academia you can’t pick me up” in a declaration that she finds love to be more like the aforementioned multi-layered equation.
The appropriately titled “Lullaby” closes out the album, as sweet and slow as molasses. As a closing track should, “Lullaby” encompasses everything that Sia is trying to put forth throughout the entire album. Dreams are made of the lines: “place your past into a book/put in everything you ever took/place your past into a book/burn the pages let them cook.” If only it were that easy. Sia seems to hope so. If the album hasn’t sent the listener entranced into a world free of troubles, patience (or fast forwarding) will yield the hidden track “Buttons.”
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