Mañana

It's probably fair to say there aren’t that many famous Mexican-Canadian singer-songwriters out there and certainly none of the stature of the late, lamented Lhasa de Sela. It's difficult to imagine Amanda Martinez achieving a similar cult status in Europe, though she has an elegant voice and this is a pleasant enough album, if overly slick, produced by Javier Limón, and full of familiar-sounding, flamenco-lite ballads with lyrics that swing between Spanish and English while routinely flirting with cliché. Opener ‘Va y Viene’ sets the tone – the kind of catchy, semi-acoustic Latin pop primed for blanket radio play in Spain and Latin America. It has an Anglophone equivalent in ‘Let's Dance’, which awkwardly breaks into full-on Latin jazz mode halfway through. Which may be indicative of this album's other failing – it can’t quite decide what it wants to be. At fleeting moments, Martinez's voice and Limón's production combine to some kind of bordering-on-haunting effect, as on the low-key title-track or on the Tijuana brass-esque ‘Días Invisibles’. The closer, ‘Que Bonita Es Esta Vida’, has a welcome earthiness. But ultimately it's all too innocuous.