This Is Acting

This is Acting has some good tracks on it and is obviously written by a very talented songwriter, it’s just not an album that demands excitement from its listeners.

It could never be accused of lacking honesty, commitment or power--some achievement given the songs were not all for her--but at times you long for Sia just to take a step back, to bring a little bit of that Zero 7 calm back into the equation.

This Is Acting, for all its backstory, rousing highlights, and questionable stylistic choices, actually feels like more of a placeholder than it was probably intended to be, continuing on the radio-ready success of 1000 Forms of Fear but doing very little to push her craft forward outside of exciting productions like “Move Your Body” and emotional breakthroughs like “Space Between”.

Very little of her pop is dull, even when she is trying to write for lowest common denominator mass appeal. The best tune here by some distance is the maddest.

It’s a pity there are some disappointing songs here because elsewhere on the record there is real brilliance.

Where her other albums are more varied, this all-guns-blazing pop portfolio is a touch wearying. [Mar 2016, p.80]

Too often This is Acting is steeped in unimaginative cliche, and leans too heavily on familiar pop tropes in a way that her previous solo albums did not.

Despite a few highlights, This Is Acting is scattered and forgettable next to the emotional 1000 Forms of Fear.

In isolation, almost everything here would be a solid example of the songwriter-for-hire’s art: if nothing bowls you over with its originality, it’s hard not to be impressed by the pitilessness with which the songs sink their hooks into you. But taken collectively, you notice the big flaw in Furler’s approach.

She manages to cut through generic themes to inject darker predilections with hard-sung vocals that sound downright masochistic at times.

Sometimes these outtakes feel like, well, outtakes.... Impressively, though, for an album that's more about utilitarian versatility than making the songs her own, Sia's personality often comes through.

Sia deserves credit for so easily slipping into the personas of her muses, but “Sweet Design,” which harks back to the go-go sound of Beyoncé's B'Day, and “Move Your Body,” whose unabashed 4/4 beat and clattering EDM percussion are straight out of Rihanna's Loud, seem more like dated outtakes than underappreciated gems.

Despite being so joyously engulfed by Sia’s voice, the songs come over as dispossessed orphans, all a variation on that same theme of being lost and held down by overbearing powers and temptations.

There are only so many times you can key into someone’s heart before they change the code, and after about 20 listens, the veneer crumbles a bit, and it’s a little too easy to see the gears turning underneath. But that’s not the most frustrating thing about the record; the most frustrating thing is that Sia has so much access to us and just doesn’t do much with it.

In almost every way This Is Acting feels safer and more ordinary than “1000 Forms of Fear,” with familiar (if sturdy) melodies and lyrical clichés about houses on fire and footprints in the sand.

Even as she and her producers flaunt their layered vocals and whiz-bang sound effects, there are already so many of Sia’s midtempo victim-to-victory anthems around that they offer diminishing returns, particularly when listened to as an album.