Following 2021’s Dawn, a second LP by the American singer and songwriter from West Memphis, Arkansas, aka Abigail Smith, moves towards an eclectic mix of gentler, more understated pop, folk, gospel, R&B, and soul, is named after her late grandmother, and has candid, personal themes of mourning and spiritual healing, something she has had to deal with more than most, her mother having killed herself in 2016 soon after she performed one her first songs, so mental as always been to the for. The beautiful Yellow Eyes has understated rhythmic handclaps and acoustic guitars and agile, but pared back vocals, filled with elliptical images about suffering and coping. Alright is even more telling: “I would say I smoke just to stand in the rain / But the true renegade drove off in a hearse/ And paper planes spilled out like a tank of propane/ Took flight over flame, too true to rehearse.” The fragile West Memphis has the feel of Carrie & Lowell by Sufjan Stevens and the half-whispered delivery of Elliott Smith. Earth Wind & California has a more expansive, uplifting, cathartic feel, and contains and noodling keyboard solo middle eight. Yebba’s vocal style is also dynamic - on the more ambient, Waterfall, as well as the later Seven Years and Different Light there are soulful echoes of Sault’s Cleo Sol, while her emotions remained tangled and torn, but vividly described: “Deep in my mind/ Even my inner critic is still a mystic / You're unrefined / Raw and uncut like the prisms / Bending time to time.” By this time, at the mid-point the album moves to a greater diversity of style. Aggressive has an industrial electro pop, her voice soaring powerfully before the song crashes to an end. The lively, syncopated Of Course plays with pacy, jazzy drums’n’ bass, then with the more pared back Delicate Roots, album moves more towards neo-soul and experimental electronica. Grief is a complex, changeable landscape of unpredictable moods. "My dreams have all been fading so long," she sings the closer Water & Wanderlust. A brave, hard-to-define album capturing a whirlwind of feelings by a candid, complex, talented artist. Out on RCA Records.
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