Ida Maria – Fortress ‘round My Heart

was initially released last year on Sony BMG, now that Ida Maria has parted ways with said label she’s seen fit to release this album again. This time it’s an independent release and “the way it was always meant to be heard”. This means that there’s now an apostrophe in the title, new artwork, three new songs and a reordered track listing. Independent release or not, we can’t help but felt that this is something of a money-grabber rather than a desire for the artistic integrity of the album to be improved. Not that we can blame Ida for wanting to get back some of what she’s doubtlessly lost to Sony.

The big question is then, is this worth buying again? The answer is probably not. Unless, that is you are a big fan of the original to make the new songs worth your money. Of these new ‘Leave Me, Let Me Go’ and ‘We’re All Going To Hell’ are both ballads with the former being quiet nice in the middle of the record and the latter being rougher and slightly overlong at over six minutes in length. ‘In The End’ on the other hand is an acoustic number that basically replaces ‘See Me Through’, which is not present on this release for some reason. All three are decent enough, but had they been hidden away somewhere as B-sides we doubt that there’d have been much clamour to see them given a fuller release.

We could comment on our preferred tracklisting of the two and point out that ‘Queen Of The World’ is now thrown away fairly early on in the record whereas previously it made a perfect and joyous penultimate track. This music is however just pop-rock and picking apart a re-jigged tracklisting is somewhat pointless, as the individual songs are still brilliantly fun pieces of pop music. of course Ida Maria does rub some people up the wrong way, and those who see her as an irritating throwaway pop star will not be won over by the higher artistic integrity of this release.

Continuing with the positive, it sounds to these ears like the album has undergone a slight re-mastering and benefits much from doing so. The gloss has gone leaving the songs ever so slightly rougher and giving them more room to breathe. It’s enough to make us recommend that anyone who doesn’t own the record buy this version (even at extra cost) rather than the Sony one. And overall we can’t help but agree that the original release should have sounded like this. Any faults that you could find with this new tracklisting will be forgotten after a couple of listens and the three new songs are easily worth the old one that’s not present.