Customer Reviews

Porcelain

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I'm not normally a love song-type of guy; most of the claptrap that passes for balladry on the radio nowadays is overarranged and filled with tired sentiment; those who think Celine Dion is just the best should try Julia Fordham's CD "Porcelain" (to begin with) and be converted. These are unabashedly direct love songs of joy, heartbreak and yearning (save for "Genius", more of an hymn to nature, to a samba beat) and they sound great, owing to the impeccably clean and intimate production style, and Julia's beautiful and soulful alto voice. It's pretty slick-sounding. My favorite is probably "For You Only For You," because it is a real torch song which harkens back to the days when girl singers were backed by orchestras rather than synthesizers and drum machines, though there's tasteful, minimal technology here throughout as well. "Did I Happen to Mention?" has a wonderful emotional sweep to it, detailing Julia's plea for more than just friendship from her beloved (you have to imagine that she would NEED to coax, I guess)--it reminds me of Anita Baker--they share a similar style. "Lock and Key" and "Manhattan Skyline" are the uptempo side starters, and how Julia can sound so elated while singing about how "broken" she was is a wonderful mystery to me. Just beautiful. The ballads are uniformly excellent as well--I suppose you can tell the talented songwriters from just mediocre ones from small touches like how she adds a beat in her rising melodic line in "Towerblock" to prolong the poignancy of the lyric just a tad longer. Sweet. Of course, she's not that popular in this country; another small injustice to popcraft that gems like these don't have much of a place on even the easy-listening stations. There--end of sermon. You can help--go out and get this one! And enjoy.

A friend of mine has just gone through a relationship turmoil that causes a lot of distress. It happens that her partner is not the one for her and finally she accepts this harsh reality.

Now that I am playing this album and I suddenly realize while I'm searching for books in Amazon, I decided to write a review of how wonderful this album is. From the start of Porcelain to Towerblock, the string of tunes with extraordinary vocals just remind me about the pain in her heart. Just like my friend's. I think about her when I listen to Towerblock and Island, or simply For you Only For you, I wish she could listen to the songs and how she can relate to the "stories" in Julia's tunes.

Whatever it is, the album is such a gem amongst the today's standard of top forty albums. I bought this one two years ago in a local record shop, in the used bins in the mint condition. How the previous owner decided to sell this one is beyond my logic. Even now his loss is truly my gain. I own this copy and the Julia Fordham Collection, and I often wonder how she wrote all those emotional tunes. she has to be a "Genius"

Julia Fordham's second album stepped ahead of her smoky, intriguing debut. She reached for some universal themes in her songwriting and came up with ten great songs that spanned the range from lonely desire ("Did I Happen to Mention") to the humorous (the Brazilian inflections of "Genius"). All these are tied together by the strength of her voice, which mirrors both Sade and Annie Lennox.

The problem then becomes that, in a world where subtle intimacy is often passed by for brash and obvious, an album like "Porcelain" will frequently slide through the cracks. Julia was fortunate enough to be a VH1 artist of the month back when the channels actually believed in music, and as such, remained something of a cult figure for fans of female singer songwriters. One of her best known songs can be found here, the coast-to-coast romance of "Manhattan Skyline."

"How could I resist, your American arms and your French kiss?
From New York to London, London to New York,
With this broken heart, so British?"

This is music for a rainy day, when you can sit with the windows open and listen to the sound of the rain and the stereo at the same time. I can't recommend "Porcelain" enough for fans of current Dido and Norah Jones' Cds.

Introduced to her music by a friend, I had no knowledge of her work before hearing this album. I no longer understand how I was able to listen to music before it. Controlled, thoughful and elegantly pained at times, it speaks to you both in romantically painted metophors ("Manhattan Skyline") and in her sultry, deep tones and divine minor chords ("For You Only For You"). An Artist with more gift than any I have ever encountered, this album is simply powerful. No other album of hers lives up to this one unfortunately, so we will carry on looking for this level of beauty to present itself again.

It must have been a daunting task to follow up her popular and critically-acclaimed eponymous first work, but she does a beautiful job with this CD. Her voice sounds velvety and understated, and she proves herself a more than capable songwriter (she wrote all ten pieces). "Lock and Key" is a lovely blend of acoustic and electronic layers, the melodic successor to the previous CD's "Happy Ever After." "Porcelain" and "Girlfriend" are soft, gentle ballads in which Julia explores her vocal range. "For You Only for You" is a torch song with a tinkling piano accompaniment (like the previous CD's wonderful "Coccooned") in which physical geography is compared with the speaker's emotional journey, a theme picked up with a more light-hearted effect in "Manhattan Skyline." "Genius" is a bouncy, Brasilian meditation on rain-forest destruction, and includes a lyric of (heavily accented) Portuguese. "Did I Happen to Mention?" is a lamentation on a potential lover who becomes just another friend. "Towerblock" is an amazingly poignant work, full of wisdom and sadness. "Island" is rife with intimations of the speaker's lesbian desires, which Julia Fordham has said were unconscious. The CD ends on a more upbeat song, with "Your Lovely Face." The mood of the entire CD is soft, gentle, and meditative, and the production is more spare, less intrusive than on her otherwise brilliant debut work. There's not a false note, nor a wasted word, on this CD. It's all wonderful.

I 'discovered' Julia while looking for something special and found it!

This CD has been stuck on the shelves of my collection, unplayed for ten years. It is only now as I systematically work through the collection ..., that I realise what a gem I've overlooked.

I've been trying to work out why, although her sales have been respectable, Julia has never achieved great commercial success. I guess her main failing is to have launched her career in the era of dance. In general the public wanted toe-tapping, extrovert singles. But Julia is more of an inward-looking chanteuse of jazz-tinged songs of her own composition. Singers have to be very, very distinctive to bring that segment to the masses.

For this album, she'd dispensed with the expensive US session musicians used on the first album and brought together a high-calibre band she could also tour with.

There are some gorgeous numbers on this album. I particularly like 'Your Lovely Face'. Many of the songs are best played when they can have your full attention -- I find that driving in the dark along very familiar roads works for me. I'm slightly less keen on the Latin rhythm songs, but that's a purely personal view.

This is one cd I would gladly take on a desert island.I bought the cassette the first time I heard it the year it was released and now I have the cd and I have never gotten tired of it after all these years. She dosen't simply say "this is what happened to me",she just gives you the pure emotion and you can put it in your own context.songs like "girlfriend" and "island" and the others really hit home and they feel as fresh today as ever.I can trully say that this is one of the best cd's I have ever heard!

I've had this album for about 5 years and it's still as moving and aurally pleasing as the first time I heard it! One of those albums you can play over and over again on your headphones while you're taking it easy on a rainy day...

...I'm so glad you're considering buying Porcelain - you WON'T be sorry if you do. I had the pleasure of seeing Julia Fordham live a few years back in San Diego; she had an awful cold and hacking cough but pulled off a wonderful show nonetheless. Quite the trooper!

the songs in this album are beautifully written and sung with so much emotions. i cannot tell you how many times i have cried listening to towerblock and girlfriend. julia fordham and her songs throughout the years, have maintained an honesty so rare nowadays in our singers. when she sings, you feel her pain, her vulnerability and her longingness for someone to just hold her and love her (e.g. towerblock). hear her LIVE, she's even better.

she's probably the most talented singer/songwriter that America has yet to appreciate and discover. although she has a pretty huge loyal followers (mostly in Asia),she has yet to make a name here, which is SAD. maybe with a new record deal, hopefully soon, people here will finally know, like we her fans have known, she is a RARE talent that surely deserve recognition.