A classy, cool, effortlessly stylish, soulful, experimental electro-pop, R'n'B, and trip-hop debut LP by the south London-based French singer, songwriter and producer, whose vocal delivery has a warm, woozy, mellifluous style, with a smudged, muted and soft guitar sound, scattered, subtle electronics, jittering percussion and nuanced, philosophical lyrics. Her sound is honeyed and smooth, the pace consistently easy, slow, rich, but flowing, her themes are self-discovery and reflection, each of the ten songs numbered as levels or metaphorical rooms, showing snapshots of her past, present and imagined future life, beginning with the distorted dreamy opener Home Alone, to the otherworldly swells of melodious sounds and scattering beats and shadowy figures and oddball headless voices of Aliens, who are more generally untrustworthy people: “When they show you the way, do you listen?”, she asks. Edge of the Map has a lovely soft bass, Watersmoke cleverly begins like it’s recorded in an echoing bathroom before coming into audio focus with lilting piano, as if at first coming from in the next room, in a gently disorientating effect. But the highlights are the deliciously gentle Ghostwriter (“I wish I had a ghostwriter - a truth teller”) and immaculately beautiful Video Games (“Video games, so hard to replace / The memories left inside of the maze/ Video games that play in my head / When the levels will fade, but I can't erase”) centrally capturing this multiplicity of realities and worlds in this dreamy haze in a warm mix of bass, electronica, the gentle friction of finger movements across guitar strings and her rich vocal sound. Lazy Days is a lovely, more stripped back number slightly reminiscent of some of Prince’s slower, acoustic songs, and another standout, the Lobby Boy, which is at the final level 10, looks back at this existential journey with a shuffling, syncopated beat, electronica, piano and guitar and that “I’ve climbed all the levels, can I try again? … Is it the end?” Overall this is a very clever, subtle, sensual, richly textured work with a unique, seductive sound, one that does make you want to go back through all the levels again as if floating through a wonderfully hallucinatory series of bathing pools. Out on Partisan Records.
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