Ready reckoning
Kimbra’s new collation and Silk Cut’s arresting debut.
A RECKONING, by Kimbra Pop may be mostly about instant gratification, but it can also be surprisingly enduring. Gotye and Kimbra’s Grammywinning Somebody That I Used to Know is more than 10 years old, but her vocal as the emotional pivot remains compelling even now.
Somebody wasn’t the first, nor the last, recognition for her flexible voice and sophisticated songwriting (she’s won seven music awards in this country), but it gave her a platform and opportunities.
She used them to move further from the mainstream into ambitious art-pop on 2018’s
Primal Heart, some of it influenced by trips to East Africa working with an organisation helping women and children with HIV.
At heart, she was still a pop artist, but of a more mature, less instant gratification kind.
Her fourth album, A Reckoning, sometimes extends her range and delivers impressive sonic breadth – the opener Save Me a slow, unguarded acknowledgment of fragility – but much of it reverts to R’n’B and hip-hop tropes. GLT with rapper Erick the Architect offers familiar feminist assertion with tough/vulnerable ambiguity; Personal Space is equally clichéd (“I need my time on my own just to be my own best friend”); Replay!, Gun and the banal New Habit (the latter sold by her urgent delivery) are jerky electro-pop underpinned by off-kilter beats. The more experimental La type with Tommy Raps and Pink Siifu is a collision of competing ideas.
Some of these are older pieces that Kimbra rediscovered during the Covid years and although A Reckoning includes fine songs (the slower Foolish Thinking and I Don’t Want to Fight), it feels more collated than coherent. And not especially enduring.
OUR PLACE IN THE STARS, by Silk Cut
In the jargon of classic British police dramas, Auckland singer/songwriter and guitarist Andrew Thorne of Silk Cut has “considerable prior form”.
He has helmed Splitter, Thorne and the Wilburys-like Calico Brothers, and has been in bands for Don McGlashan, Bic Runga, Dave Dobbyn, Tim Finn, Jan Hellriegel and