grief

A Confessional Space (Sampha, Process review)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

There is space for soul music in the electronic genre. So much space for it that the music goes to great lengths to amplify our own souls. And yes it’s a lot to process, but it’s worth it, I know this.

 

Sampha – Process
released February 3, 2017
********* 9/10

Sampha is a UK Singer/Songwriter who lives in the worlds of soul, r&b and electronic music. With moody and beautiful tracks and an overwhelming sense of passion to boot. When it comes to emotional jams, I never know if it’s a really a cliche at mention tropes super early on in a review, but electronic music often gets dumped in with outer space, and yet Sampha knows how to combine that sensitivity in with heartbreaking melodies, beautiful piano sequences, and explosive instrumentation.

There is a fire inside these tracks and I don’t think there is a way to put it out.

With that mentioned, there are also a great many quiet moments rooted in the fundamentals of soul and r&b throughout, and opener track Plastic 100 Degrees Celsius sets it all up nicely as far as slowburner tracks go. Investigating his mortality through an unidentified lump, Sampha lets us know right away this is not going to be the typical self-gratifying album.

This is a guy who has collaborated with some of today’s most forward thinking artists. From Frank Ocean, to Jessie Ware, to Drake to 40. Not to mention both Beyoncé and Solange, and yes he’s made his voice known with Kanye too. Working behind the scenes, this guy has been actually been working on Process for years, a lot of it coming together while his mother fought cancer, and as a consequence it is gut wrenching to listen to.

A tour de force of production, sonics, and lyrics, Sampha has proved yet again that living in the alternative will do for R&B, hip hop and soul music exactly what it did for rock in the 1990s. Make them epic. This really has been a decade of emotion, process, and processing – Sampha and his piano, are at the centre of it.

Take in the track, (No One Knows Me) Like the Piano. It perfectly demonstrates this notion.

This is an album full of standout tracks, it’s hard to look at the whole without looking at the parts, as each song could be viewed on it’s own and dissected for hours. I kind of wish I had spent more time with it before I released this review, if I’m being perfectly honest. Maybe it’s that family weaves so clearly through each of the tracks and dovetails the message of going home when you need to with What Shouldn’t I Be?.

Sampha is haunted by insecurities just like any of us, Blood on Me proves it, but there is also warmth in his longings, wishing for more time with his mother on Kora Sings.

I especially enjoyed Take Me Inside and Under, which are explosive in their instrumentation while maintaining the pace of everything else surrounding them on the album. How he is able to clearly define both his image and perception of him is something due to patience and humility, and it’s in those two tracks, among others, where we see why the current greats have worked with Sampha.

It is both a process of musical production and of grieving, and it works excellently. An opportunity to join him in his own private world of sound, even as he feels stripped away from that which he knows best.

theories Summarized

It’s a weighty powerful album and invariably one of my favourites this year.

Process is an exercise in contemplation, one that demands you sit with it, come back to it, leave it alone for a while, and then binge on it over and over again, all the while daydreaming inside your own head. It’s incredibly intricate, and it’s a process all it’s own. My theory of course.

Tim!

Steel Your Heart Away (Miranda Lambert, The Weight Of These Wings review)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

It’s always a challenge to make a good album. And to make a great album, even tougher. But what happens when you attempt to do the ol’ double deuce for your fans? Well it can go off really well or really poorly, just a matter of perspective.

And boy does this week’s album review have it in spades.

Miranda Lambert – The Weight Of These Wings
released November 18, 2016
******* 7/10

credit-daniela-federici

Miranda Lambert is an American country music singer/songwriter, and is also a member of the Pistol Annies (alongside Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley). Lambert has won seven consecutive Academy of Country Music awards for Female Vocalist of the Year, two Grammy Awards, and is the first woman to have won the County Music Association Awards Album of the Year twice.

Having recorded six studio albums to date, starting with Kerosene in 2005, Lambert is no stranger to success in the country music genre. In fact, from 2011 to 2015, Lambert was married to fellow country singer Blake Shelton.

Normally I wouldn’t really care about that last factor, but it’s important to consider within the scope of this album and it’s release date. You see, dear readers, Miranda Lambert started to write this album following the fallout of her divorce. It was July of 2016 that she released Vice, an emotional track that is something of a tearjerker for her, morally ambiguity aside. Because we don’t know what sparked the divorce, not really. After all, we all have our vices that we lean on from time to time, but she couldn’t really do anything to spread the truth out about it when she split from Shelton – that was already in the open air, the tension the anger, the emotional wreckage.

That’s the impression I get when I listen to this album over and over. And that’s something I felt necessary to do as practice, to make sure I wasn’t missing any emotions or stages of grief as she got over what had happened.

Another concept album for the year, Lambert decided to split this record up into two parts, each at twelve tracks. The first disc being labelled as The Nerve and the second, ever so clever, is The Heart.

Interestingly enough, it’s not just an album full of fears – substance abuse, cheating on a marriage an aging woman, the problems associated with touring, losing faith. No, that’s just the first half. It’s also about confronting those fears, and that’s where the second disc comes in. The ideation and definitions of this exploration by Lambert are good, but not necessarily as powerful as my favourite album of the year – Angel Olsen My Woman.

Yeah, that’s right… it could have been a tighter compilation of tracks, organized into two sections for sure, but without splitting it up over two discs and forcing me to remain aware of the run time eternally. There just seems to be a bit of fill in here. It’s hard to point out and crucify specific tracks, but the pacing feels really long and we sometimes forget the themes as a consequence.

I think you should pay attention to Vice, Tin Man, Ugly Lights, Smoking Jacket, Highway Vagabond, Pushin’ Time, Keeping The Flame and To Learn Her in particular. There are a number of great songs, that could easily make a solid singular disc, but it’s not terrible, I think you should give it a listen. Americana yes.

 

 

 

This is the greatest range of emotion and ability we’ve seen from Lambert yet, and in fact, I could argue it’s probably one of the best country albums I’ve heard in a long time. But the double album play somehow cheapens the weight of the work being done here. That could just be a theory though.

Tim!