Take one soft, chiming acoustic song. Add a little extra instrumentation, but keep it subtle: some gentle drums and a cello, maybe. Then take a polished vocal line with the professional sheen of a chart-topping hit; drape it carefully over the mix, and you may well have something akin to the sound of Norwegian songstress Kari Kleiv.

It's a sound that could work. There are some lovely, delicate melodies here, it's a slightly different take on the average acoustic sound, and it's very polished. In fact, it's polished to the extent that it begins to sound impersonal and disengaged... and therein lies the problem. Acoustic songs, lacking as they do the punch of a full band, usually reel the listener in with a suggestion of intimacy, a personal touch. Remove that intimacy and replace it with a sound which is slick and professional but ultimately disengaged, and you have a problem. How do you make a soft love song hold the listener enthralled when it sounds this non-committal and distant? It doesn't work for me.

Maybe I'm misreading Ms Kleiv: maybe this disengaged feeling is deliberate. Maybe this is intended as an abstract study on a particular way of feeling love, rather than an expression of Kleiv's own emotions. If so, it's a side of love I've never experienced, and part of me therefore thinks that my not appreciating the emotional angle these songs take might be down to a deficit of experience on my part. But another part of me is muttering "good job, too - I don't want any truck with a love so fireless as to be evoked by sounds as sub-emotional as this". Such, I suppose, is the infinite variety inherent in the gamut of human emotions. Or something.