Moving along with caution

KT Tunstall “Drastic Fantastic” (Virgin)

** 1/2

NEXT to Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse, last year’s other two big female arrivals from the British pop world, Tunstall seemed relatively tame, even stodgy -- an earnest, folk-rooted pop artist who loved the poetry of Joni Mitchell and the simple directness of Carole King.

The Scot’s debut album “Eye to the Telescope,” showed a flair for sweeping melody, a smooth, powerful voice and a willingness to settle into a Coldplay and Fleetwood Mac comfort zone. The song that really sparked her success was an anomaly, recorded late and added to the album before its release -- “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree,” a dreamlike, syncopated scenario of mystery and passion.

Tunstall’s second album (in stores Tuesday) has one song, “Hold On,” that returns to that dynamism, but overall the collection is a cautious advance. Tunstall and producer Steve Osborne still don’t have a taste for rough edges, but “Drastic Fantastic” has more immediacy than “Telescope,” with a freshness in the performances and a new authority in her singing.

The album combines a pub-rock earthiness with an arsenal of pop production tricks that keeps the music interesting on an almost subliminal level. It’s more professional than compellingly personal, but a lack of pretension lets the choruses soar and the hooks kick in with full, pleasurable effect. If Tunstall wants to make it more than that, though, she should get on the trail of that black horse.

-- Richard Cromelin

Spare, uncluttered, utterly effective

Mary Gauthier

“Between Daylight and Dark” (Lost Highway)

* * * 1/2

After the breakthrough of her extraordinary 2005 album “Mercy Now,” which put this Louisiana-reared singer and songwriter in a league with the likes of John Prine and Kris Kristofferson, Gauthier has plenty more to offer in this assured and equally revealing follow-up.

Many of the songs center on human attachment -- how desperate it can be to want it, how lost it can feel not to find it, how devastating it can be to lose it and how liberating it can be not to need it.

Such emotional freedom is at the heart of “Last of the Hobo Kings,” a ballad from the folk-troubadour tradition as celebrated historically by the likes of Will Rogers, Woody Guthrie and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, but revisited more than half a century later, when the idea of anyone riding the rails and shifting aimlessly from town to town has been reduced to a half-remembered social fantasy.

Once again, her music is spare, largely acoustic guitar accompaniment as uncluttered as her prose; her voice has the plain-spoken, quintessentially American integrity of a female Henry Fonda, a white Maya Angelou. Producer Joe Henry adds atmospheric touches -- deep bass drum here, skittering electric guitar or haunting steel there -- but it’s totally Gauthier’s show.

With songwriting as powerful as hers, there’s no need to go looking for qualifiers -- there’s no need to think of her as pre-, post-, anti-, retro- anything. She’s a unique, intrinsically valuable musical voice. And there’s never a surplus of those.

-- Randy Lewis

Actors should stick to acting

Various artists

“Across the Universe” soundtrack (Interscope)

* *

Here’s a movie soundtrack (in stores Tuesday) that’s more appealing if you haven’t seen the film, a jumbled, too-literal meditation on the ‘60s counterculture as viewed through the prism of the music of the Beatles. Although there are cameos from some marquee rockers in the Julie Taymor film (Bono, Joe Cocker), the bulk of the songs are handled by the lead actors (Jim Sturgess, Evan Rachel Wood) in the theatrically cinematic experiment, in which characters spontaneously break into song, á la Dennis Potter’s groundbreaking British TV work.

But even with many inviting arrangements and inventive production work from T Bone Burnett and Elliot Goldenthal (Taymor’s husband), the Lennon-McCartney and Harrison songs too often wind up in nowhere land.

Sturgess, who plays the romantic lead, is laid-back to the point of dreariness, whether it’s on the originally ebullient “All My Loving,” George Harrison’s exquisite “Something” or Lennon’s ethereal “Across the Universe.” Wood, as Lucy, is inoffensively innocuous singing “Blackbird.” Dana Fuchs, as the movie’s Janis Joplin-ish free-spirited rocker girl, is vibrant, but hews too close to the Joplin blueprint to assert any of her own identity.

The use of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” in a scene about the horrors of Vietnam is an indication of the Music Video 101 mentality that undermines the film.

Bono brings welcome authority and personality to his version of “I Am the Walrus,” and Cocker’s gristly rendition of “Come Together” simply sizzles, suggesting this whole project might have fared better in the hands, and vocal cords, of musical pros.

Taymor has said she considers the Beatles lyrics as her show’s libretto. She should have used them as her inspiration.

-- R.L.

Albums are rated on a scale of four stars (excellent), three stars (good), two stars (fair) and one star (poor). Albums reviewed have been released except as indicated.