A serenely beautiful, but also nostalgically sorrowful fourth LP by American singer-songwriter Azniv Korkejian who has Armenian-Syrian heritage, with songs about displacement and identity, very mindful of Middle Eastern conflicts, atrocities and her family history, while broadening her sound into the lush mould of 1970s Carole King and Laurel Canyon. The album was inspired by Korkejian’s return to her childhood home in Saudi Arabia to visit her parents before their retirement to Armenia. The album hovers over many ifs and buts, what may have happened if the chance to escape the Middle East to the US had not occurred. Her mother is from Syria and raised in Lebanon, her father also born and raised in Syria, then becoming a young immigrant worker in Saudi Arabia, where Korkejian’s brothers were also born. They briefly relocated to Syria so Korkejian could be born there around broader family before returning to Saudi Arabia.
The four gorgeous opening tracks are an expansion of her previous, more intimate acoustic style, and very much hark back to feeling of a more luxurious era, but ironical starker reality of hardship and insecurity. On My Own comes on a bed of piano and flute, her voice rich and deep. Long Way To Feel is another melancholic thing of beauty: “Up and away I wanted to get you / Out of that place where the feelings are fake and all / All of the tales are tall.” Always On Time captures a sense of insecurity: “If you feel the world’s against you / It’s as though the world has fenced you / In and just about,/ Everyone but you / Has got it figured out.” A gentle 70s pop/funk with flute of One Thing Right subtly covers an abusive marriage. Central track Canopies includes a recording of her mother Janet’s spoken word recollection of her own childhood, and tells how her mother was placed in an orphanage for children of the Armenian genocide by Korkejian’s grandmother, to protect her from her abusive husband with the devastating “I loved you too much to keep you, so I committed a crime.” Deghma Cheega immigrant experience of dislocation, while the title track captures the mixed feelings of insecurity, love and protection from her family as she recalls emerging from a swimming pool as a young girl: “I swear it wasn't long/ That I was just someone's little fool / Stepping out the pool / To a towel wrapped around my tired arms / I was so small / Yet nothing at all/ Could alarm me / But oh, everybody's older now … Wrangled in the bath / Beads of water down my tangled hair/ And my neon summer skin / Chalky eyes still blushing from the chlorine.” Gracefully moving, beautiful work. Out on Bedouine Music / Thirty Tigers.
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