Why there is still no one quite like Norah
Fever-dream of an album shows class
NORAH JONES: Pick Me Up Off The Floor (Blue Note)
Verdict: Distinctive fusion ★★★★✩
KODALINE: One Day At A Time (B-Unique)
Verdict: Steady progression ★★★✩✩
YOU used to know where you stood with Norah Jones. Her music was a reliably soothing balm, and her 2002 debut Come Away With Me a gentle backdrop to a polite dinner party.
It also scooped eight Grammy Awards, prompting Jones to admit she felt as if she’d ‘gone to somebody else’s birthday party and eaten all their cake’.
But the singer from the Dallas suburbs has been quietly dismantling that too-good-to-betrue image. Over the years she has worked with rockers Dave Grohl and Billie Joe Armstrong, and thrown herself into a series of intrepid side-projects, including her all-girl country trio Puss N Boots, who released their second album in February.
Her solo LPs have become bolder, too, with one a partnership with maverick dance producer Danger Mouse. With the exception of 2004’s massive-selling Feels Like Home, they have fared respectably rather than spectacularly — her slice of the Grammys gateau has become more modest — but Jones, 41, has grown as an artist.
The mother of two returned to her piano-based jazz roots on 2016’s Day Breaks, but has since gone off on a tangent again, walking away from the usual album-tour cycle to release a string of offbeat singles.
Between those sessions, she has also written the songs that make up her new solo album. Pick Me Up Off The Floor was recorded in stages, but it feels complete. Its tone is largely melancholy, with plenty of mournful cello and violin, but Jones’s bluesy, soulful piano adds sly melodic twists.
‘If there’s darkness, it’s not an impending sense of doom,’ she says. ‘It’s more like a human longing for connection.’
The jazz influences revisited on Day Breaks are still there. Drummer Brian Blade, who played on that album, kicks these songs along with subtle finesse. Trumpets and sax warble, and Jones’s voice is still an extraordinary instrument. Despite that, this fever-dream of an album is less of a straight-no-chaser jazz affair.
It opens with the slow How I Weep, all plucked violins and upright bass, before becoming more forceful on the soul numbers Flame Twin and Hurts To Be Alone.
On the lovesick ballad Heartbroken, Day After, Jones finds herself ‘hopelessly out of control’, but her knack of inserting bright piano motifs into even her most downbeat songs lifts the mood.
It’s not all gloom. Say No More isn’t a wink-wink reference to a classic Monty Python sketch, but a twisting jazz number that nods to the Laurel Canyon singers of the 1970s as it chronicles a dangerous liaison. This Life employs soulful harmonies and Were You Watching? features Celtic fiddle.
If Pick Me Up... fades slightly beyond the halfway point, it’s lifted by two collaborations with alternative country star Jeff Tweedy, of Chicago band Wilco.
I’m Alive touches on patriarchy and U.S. politics while keeping a positive outlook, and Heaven Above is a wintry ballad imbued with a powerful sense of yearning and images of snow being brushed off a roof. No longer the ingenue who became the best-selling female artist of the Noughties — and then recoiled in horror from the whirlwind that engulfed her — Jones has matured into a singersongwriter who can weave pop, jazz, blues and soul into a languid fusion with a distinctive touch.
KODALINE modestly called themselves ‘four lads in a band’ when they released their debut album In A Perfect World in 2013.
The Irish quartet specialised in big choruses with vocal harmonies designed to be sung back at them by large crowds. It’s a tactic that has served Coldplay well.
THEY have since made two more albums, adding louder guitars and extra gloss to the mix, but return to a simpler, more streamlined approach on fourth LP One Day At A Time.
That debt to Coldplay remains, though, especially on Wherever You Are, on which Steve Garrigan sounds uncannily like Chris Martin, and the Fix You-like ballad Saving Grace.
They can be cloying, with lyrics that paint only in broad brushstrokes. But there’s also something admirably selfcontained to a record self-produced in Dublin by bassist Jason Boland. Spend It With You is a sweet, McCartney-esque love song, while Garrigan’s mandolin adds a street busker’s touch to the catchy Sometimes.