One of the more interesting records of 2016 was The Visitor, the debut album of LA based musician Khadhja Bonet. Very much rooted in the Soul sound of the early Seventies at its most extravagant, think of Minnie Ripperton's Les Fleurs, Isaac Hayes's Hot Buttered Soul or the gorgeous orchestral swirl of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, while borrowing freely from the fertile imaginations of the likes of George Clinton and Sun Ra, it was a luxuriant re-imagining of the past, a waking dream.
In her self-penned biography, Bonet wrote of herself: 'Kad-Ya was born in the backseat of a sea-foam green space pinto. After spending an extraordinary long time in her mother's plasma, she discovered the joys and gratifications of making noise with her hands and face while travelling at maximum velocity through intergalactic quadrants.' There's no real answer to this, but you have to at the very least respect its chutzpah and the music very much lived up to its hype. It was a glorious, technicolor Cosmic Soul statement. There was nobody else around attempting quite what Bonet was aiming for here.
Two years on and Bonet's new record Childqueen consolidates and enhances the achievements of The Visitor. It's another gorgeous, multi-faceted and deeply layered record, entirely self-written, played and produced. Like bathing in milk or sleeping in silk sheets, it's a perfectly realised vision, like watching time-lapse film of petals opening, fruit ripening and raindrops plopping on enlarged images of flowers. A special album indeed!
No comments:
Post a Comment