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Emma Bunton – My Happy Place (Album Review)

Florian Buechting Media Review No Comments

Emma Bunton - My Happy Place

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Emma Bunton - My Happy Place
3.1

Rating

 3.1/5

Flyctory.com Pros

  • Great title track
  • "2 become 1" with Robbie

Flyctory.com Cons

  • Some poor tracks

Baby Spice is back – 13 years after her last album, Emma Bunton released her fourth album, “My Happy Place”, on 12th April 2019. Just in the year of the Spice World reunion tour, the 43-year old added some new songs to her portfolio. Here is my view on whether it is worth buying that long-player.

 

Emma Bunton – About the Artist

I feel that I do not need to tell you too much about Emma Bunton – you all know her, at least from her Spice Girls days. However, especially What took you so long was a huge success also on international level. “Baby Spice” had a couple of hits in the UK, where the band was even more successful than in the rest of the world.

Maybe was also a huge hit for Emma Bunton.

 

Emma Bunton – My Happy Place – Track by Track

Here is my track-by-track view of Emma Bunton’s 2019 album. It covers ten tracks with a total playtime of just 33 minutes.

1. Baby Please Don’t Stop

The first track is just a wonderful welcome greeting to Bunton’s album: first of all, there is her crystal-clear soft voice, which does not feel to have faded over the last years. Secondly, it is another good mood-swinging pop song which just makes you want to hear the nine following tracks. Great one!

2. I Wish I Could Have Loved You More

This track is really strange to me. Feels a bit psychodelic. Cover of the Candie Payne song.

3. Too Many Teardrops

This ballad has a bit of 1960s style to me. I also felt like in a James Bond movie. Hard to describe, but I really like this track.

4. I Only Want to Be with You (feat. Will Young)

The most prominent versions of this song to be are the ones by Dusty Springfield and Samantha Fox. If you want to have a rock-alike version, you might prefer the Bay City Rollers’ one.The Emma Bunton duet with Will Young, a British actor and singer, is a very slow interpretation of it, very quiet. That makes it very decent and easy to underestimate. I don’t like it.

5. Don’t Call Me Baby

Another soft, gentle, a bit too decent track. But in contrast to the cover before, it has more spirit to me. But still a song which is too easy to forget, unfortunately. The interesting fact of this song that it is a cover of a Madison Avenue song – an Australian duo who is making house music. Quite a transformation.

6. You’re All I Need to Get By (feat. Jade Jones)

Using wikipedia words, Jade Jones is the “on-off relationship” of Emma Bunton. Jade Jones is known as the singer of the R&B band Damage, who had their biggest success with the song Wonderful Tonight. I did not know that track, but absolutely liked this version of the Aretha Franklin classic.

7. Come Away with Me (feat. Josh Kumra)

This album confuses me. There are nice dance tracks, which make you sway and like to party or at least enjoy yourself. And there are these extremely slow tracks like Come away with me, which is in fact a cover of a 2002 Norah Jones song. At least it is nicely interpreted with British singer-songwriter Josh Kumra.

8. Emotion

This is a track I like much more – just because I admire the interpretation of this song by the Bee Gees and Samantha Fox. Nevertheless, merging the legendary sound of four British super-actors into the soft voice of Emma Bunton is definitely a great deal.

9. 2 Become 1 (feat. Robbie Williams)

2 Become 1 from the album Spice was one of the very favorite Spice Girls songs forever. I was looking that much forward to that song when I spotted it on the track list. Emma Bunton and Robbie Williams just do not disappoint me. The video does not reflect the album version absolutely, but it illustrate how well this song fits to their voices. It is just a massive song to me anyway.

10. Here Comes the Sun

In the intro of this track, Emma Bunton is chatting with her son – and he even shares the first lyrics with her of this Beatles classic. It is definitely a very nice and characteristic interpretation of the song,

 

Emma Bunton – My Happy Place – My View

To me, this album is rather tough to rate. It starts with an absolutely smashing title track. Most of the other songs are covered. I like some of the interpretation very much – some other are rather confusing me or don’t give me a chance to really like them.

Buy it or leave it? I like Emma Bunton, definitely. I guess the album will sell very well in the UK – but might be a rather limited performer in other countries. The album is not all bad, but definitely not a must-buy as well. But listening to it the second and third time (which is very quick due to the limited playtime) makes it feel better and better. Critics will love them much more than I do, I guess, due to the sometimes quite characteristic re-interpretations of some legendary songs.

One week later, Bananarama released their 2019 album “In Stereo”.

 

Emma Bunton – My Happy Place – Amazon Links

Here are links to amazon if you want to order or download the album:

 

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