Album Review: Bic Runga Belle

New Zealand's Runga kicks off her first record in five years with a shot at perfect pop, and doesn't hit too far from the mark. The '60s girl-group-inspired number, with a 'screw you, I don't care' attitude, Tiny Little Piece Of My Heart is backed with echo-soaked handclap percussion and is the kind of opening track you'll skip back to hear again before you even push through to the rest of the album. It's not the only case of '60s revisit-ism, as Devil On Tamborine has a heavy Zombies feel and borrows most of its melody from The Turtles' Happy Together, but it's so obvious you have to read it as an ode as opposed to trying to fool you into thinking it's an original idea.

The delicate sparseness of Everything Is Beautiful And New sounds like it's been pulled from a musical, her lyrical picture-painting is descriptive and metaphoric while it holds onto a thread of melancholia. Subtle production on this song and elsewhere – like the hip hop beats and strings on Good Love and Darkness All Around Us – really gives her vocals enough space to be right out in front where they need to be. Belle is sung in French, and if the album wasn't already so varied in styles and contexts it would probably stick out as a bizarre idea, but as an interlude it works brilliantly. Strangely, the album's flattest moment is lead single, Hello Hello, which does a really terrible job of hyping listeners for the accomplished collection of tracks Runga has assembled. Ditch this track and you have a near perfect pop album.