Sophie Ellis-Bextor: Wanderlust – review

Ellis-Bextor, 17 years a pop star and now a 34-year-old mother of three, sounds like a nine-year-old girl on this, her very fey fifth album. Producer Ed Harcourt has met her mannered delivery and plummy English vowels with string-soaked arrangements but they're more saccharine than stirring, particularly when set against choruses such as: "Girl's got to have a little day dream" on the pastel-coloured Runaway Daydreamer. There's an uncomfortably quaint waltz in Love is a Camera and Interlude ends up sounding like a Mary Poppins pastiche: it's all too easy to picture Ellis-Bextor floating skyward, umbrella in hand, singing "It's clearly plain to see/The sun is breaking through the clouds."