Albums of the week: three new releases
The outstanding young Welsh soprano Natalya Romaniw was singing – “stunningly” – the role of Puccini’s Madam Butterfly at ENO when the lockdown cut the run short, said Fiona Maddocks in The Observer. Opera buffs were also looking forward to seeing her as Dvorák’s Rusalka at Garsington this summer. That’s off the cards, but they can console themselves with her debut disc (dedicated to her Ukrainian grandfather), a celebration of Slavic song which explores the work of the Russians Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninov, and the Czechs Dvorák, Janácek and Novák. Romaniw’s voice suits the material perfectly – its “timbre flecked and speckled with character and emotion”.
Seconds into the first Rimsky-Korsakov song, you’re “in her grip – seduced, awed, maybe even frightened by this voluptuously flowing, dark-toned voice”, said Geoff Brown in The Times. Perhaps inevitably, this Slavic voyage “emphasises life’s sorrows rather than joys”; there’s a certain “emotional claustrophobia” to proceedings. But the singing is sublime.
As Paramore’s “fiery frontwoman” for half her life, Hayley Williams is “emo-rock’s most successful” female artist, said Lisa Verrico in The Sunday Times. She has always resisted the lure of a solo career. But listening to the “avalanche of intimate emotions” on this, her intense first solo album, it’s as if she had no choice but to spill her secrets. The darkest songs are the standouts, but “Williams laying her life bare is never less than compelling”.
Sonically, there are hints of the discofunk grooves that were explored on Paramore’s last album, 2017’s After Laughter, said Claire Shaffer in Rolling Stone. But whereas that record was a “geyser of anthemic choruses and bright emotionalism”, Williams’ solo album is “murkier, more eclectic and much less predictable” – with an excitingly diverse range of influences, from Janet Jackson to Björk. At 15 tracks, this is quite a long album, and two or three songs are “retread” filler. But for the most part, it’s gripping stuff – the “sound of an artist blooming” into peak form.
Alongside the likes of Solange, SZA and Kelela, Kehlani Parrish is one of the female acts “invigorating contemporary R&B”, said Ludovic Hunter-Tilney in the FT. The songs on her second studio album are mostly about those “staple R&B topics” love and sex. But Kehlani brings a highly distinctive, soulful spin to things. For example, in Bad News she makes a raw appeal to a lover from the wrong side of the tracks, while a “churchlike choral melody” is woven into the background. The songs’ grooves and catchiness are “subtle, not brash”, and her singing is “confiding and close-up, almost diary-like in its effect”.
Kehlani is a fixture of America’s gossip columns and has endured a notably tumultuous private life, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. Here, there’s plenty of lyrical “rumour-stoking” and “pot-stirring”. But it would be a shame if it drowned out the “impressively confident” music, which offers “21st century reboots of the oldfashioned R&B slow jam”, sprinkled with “subtle, clever sonic touches” and “unexpected sounds and samples”.