Leyla McCalla

★★★★ Breaking The Thermometer ANTI-. CD/DL/LP

Inspired by Haitian insurgence, a cellist finds a rebellious new folk.

A former Carolina Chocolate Drop and a current member of roots supergroup Our Native Daughters, Haitian-American songwriter Leyla McCalla has made a series of intriguing solo albums that express her intertwined origins – pizzicato cello ballads set to Langston Hughes poetry, buttery soul gnawed by noise-rock guitar, sly banjo jingles betraying her past as a New Orleans busker. Her fourth, Breaking The

Thermometer, funnels those disparate means into a unified end. Prompted by a university commission, McCalla plundered the archives of Radio Haiti, the proud and politically fraught island nation’s first independent signal, to emerge with a complex sequence of Creole folk songs, musique concrète collages, and metaphysical pop tunes about identity and memory. Though the project is steeped in timely questions of democracy and righteousness, McCalla supplies an unexpected tenderness even to songs about political prisoners. An exquisite distillation of hope and perseverance, mystery and humanity.

Grayson Haver Currin