Classically trained cellist North Carolina's Kelsey Lu has just released her debut album Blood and it's an evocative and elegant record of moody depths that constantly surprises and avoids easy categorisation. Soulful, but with inventive and deft arrangements, it's pop music filtered through classical influences and all the more interesting for that.
I found myself listening through to it, seeking easy references and connections and not being able to make them and finding the record all the more involving for just that reason. In some respects it's something of an avant gard album in that it's experimental and elusive but at the same time it tips out a whole cupboard of melodies and emotions along the way. At the same time, it's by no means a difficult listen despite its bravery.
Occasionally the record gets more obviously conventional as on Poor Fake, which seems to run on more accessible Soul or R & B rails and sounds like something you could easily imagine playing on daytime radio but even here Lu's voice suddenly takes the track in a different direction and the song takes flight in a quite astonishing way.
If you're looking for a record that constantly surprises then you could do far worse than plumping for Blood. Oddly, towards the end of the album, Lu throws a spanner in the works by choosing to cover 10cc's mid-Seventies weepie classic I'm not in Love and opting to play it pretty much straight. As someone who has heartily detested this particular track since I remember it being voted the best song of all time by the listeners of London's Capital Radio in the mid Seventies, I wish she hadn't bothered because frankly she has much more interesting songs of her own.
Once this blip has been overcome however, Blood recovers its poise with a series of tracks that remind me of what drew me to it before its brush with Seventies mush. Lu is clearly an artist to watch. Interspersing songs that sound like genuine potential hits with unnerving tracks that disorientate and offer no easy answers making this a strange but highly compelling listen.
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