Beautiful women, according to popular wisdom, do not need to develop a personality, because men will talk to them regardless.

This theory has some logic to it, though it almost certainly isn’t true. Can we become so accomplished in one field (our looks, our career, our hobbies) that we neglect our development elsewhere? Are we such talented jugglers that we never bother to learn to ride the unicycle?

Our Broken Garden, the solo project of Danish artist Anna Bronsted, might be an example of this quandary. Bronsted might be such a talented singer that she has forgotten to tend to the other aspects of her music.

Now let’s get one thing clear from the outset, Golden Sea is by no measure a terrible album, but it is almost certainly not as good as it could or should be. At its best, on tracks such as ‘The Departure’, ‘Warriors of Love’, and ‘The Darkred Roses’, Bronsted adopts the elegant reverbed piano and synths of Hail to the Thief-era Radiohead, the careful dynamic shifts of Labradford or Sigur Ros, and her beautiful voice which is reminiscent of Beach House’s Victoria Legrand. The overall effect is something akin to The School of Seven Bells, only a whole lot more weary of the world.

Where Bronsted runs into trouble it is due to a combination of incongruous instrumentation (witness the rasping guitar solo on ‘Garden Grow’) unimaginative treatment of her vocals (reverb, reverb and more reverb) and the uneventful pacing of the album as a whole (slow and brooding is the name of the game).

The most consistently problematic element of the instrumentation is the drums, which seem to have been added as an afterthought. While percussion can rarely make an album, they can quite easily detract from one. Throughout Golden Sea the pragmatically programmed drums plod along with little more than a kick and a snare as if trying to pull the solemn pace of the vocals and strings unceremoniously forward without any real attempt to add to the intensity of the music. On a few occasions, most notably on ‘The Fiery and Loud’ the drums seem to progress at an altogether different pace from the rest of the song. On ‘The Burial’, an otherwise austere track, the kick, snare, toms and handclaps appear to have been lifted straight from a Michael Jackson album.

While the drums are the most obvious mis-step, the entire album has a feeling of being a few weeks short of completion. The guitars, the strings, the synths, are all relatively simplistic and just don’t feel like they have been chosen with love or care. Moreover the whole album is so firmly rooted in the treble that eventually it becomes grating; this is definitely one to avoid for those suffering from tinnitus. This is a pity, because for a few brief moments Golden Sea has the promise of a beautiful marriage between ambient electronica, slightly gothic pop and soaring vocals. Perhaps this is what happens when you are blessed with a voice which is just too good.