Album Review: Emeli Sandé - Long Live the Angel

3/5

It’s four years since Emeli Sandé entranced an audience of millions at the Olympics closing ceremony. In the aftermath, she seemed poised to ascend to Adele-levels of popularity, her songs a winning mix of glittering and vulnerable.

But rather than blossoming in the spotlight, the shy Scottish singer (and trained neuroscientist) appeared to wilt slightly. “It does feel like a rollercoaster,” she had told me as her career was taking off. “ I am still adjusting. It feels crazy. There are moments you think that it’s just mad.”

She returns with an album calibrated to reinvigorate the fan base that had surely started to wonder what had become of her. Sandé’s marriage broke up in 2014, and there followed a bout of professional and personal self-doubt — yet listening to Long Live the Angels, you’d never guess she’s been through the wringer.

Instead,the record is of a piece with her sparkly and accessible debut, Our Version of Events.There are flashes of pain and confusion, but the cracks are glossed over on a collection machine-tooled more to sound impactful on radio than to bring spiritual succour.

She gives it the full Adele on comeback single, ‘Hurts’, her voice rising from a coo to a shriek as strings swish and swoon. The same crowd-pleasing colours ‘Breathing Underwater’ and ‘Happen’, which tinker at the margins of the blueprint established on her first record.

Sandé’s assertion that Long Live the Angels was informed by her father’s Zambian roots isn’t really borne out. The closest she comes to veering off track is ‘Tenderly’, which features the Serenje Choir. Yet, the globe-trotting trappings fail to meaningfully influence a song that is reluctant to depart from the formula.

Not every artist is able to take half a decade off, confident in the knowledge that their audience will hang about. Adele has that luxury, but can Sandé swoop back into the lives of her fans, after the pop equivalent of several lifetimes away? Long Live The Angels is the ‘more of the same’ follow-up devotees of Our Version of Events will have craved. We will shortly know whether it is too little too late.