The London artist Eliza Caird (formerly under the mainstream pop moniker Eliza Doolittle) returns with more of the cool, slow, sensual, gentle, sophisticated experimental soul-funk style evolving from her 2022 album A Sky Without Stars, here with particularly polished, silky, stripped back grooves and vocals. She rebranded to ELIZA in 2018 after finishing with Parlophone as a pop artist. There’s a stylish quirkiness alongside a maturity to her sound, with finely layered vocal harmonies and musicianship from Finlay Robson on guitar, bass, drums, and synths, and Shaan Ramaprasad on strings. But also intense emotions simmer beneath the surface. Standouts include Anyone Else and the sensual beat and bleeps Pleasure Boy, both of which capture a stylistic understated essence of Prince, combined with that sotto voce soul and intricate RnB delivery reminiscent of Lianne La Havas. On the first of those two she sings: “Afraid of love / I sabotage myself to gain the illusion of control / I don’t want you to leave me lonely / But you got me and I got you and wherever you are is where I’m coming,” where there’s more desperation and frustration here than romance: “I need you to know that it’s true” repeated over and over. Cheddar is another highlight, with love taken for granted: “Is that all I am to you / I should have known better / I gave you the benefit of the doubt / You don’t love me / Really really/ Pseudo sweetness.” There’s a bitterness and frustration at play throughout the record, moving between accusation to tenderness underneath these finely crafted sounds although on the beautifully produced Because We Can there’s also some defiance positivity (“No matter what may come /Let's get up / Not give up. For The Hell of It takes aim at greed, Spiral has intricate shuffle rhythms and a north African flavour, but points out humanity’s self-destruction: “We spiral through space on a miracle / While killing ourselves for a pocket full / Forgetting that life is our only love / And all of this time isn't gonna last,” while closer Zombie-Like describes and captures the somnambulism of our times: “I really hope that I'm not sleeping through everything.” Serious, stylish, but also effortlessly cool. Out on Log Off Records.
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