Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By A.A. Williams, Bella Union 2020.
A.A. Williams is an English singer/songwriter who burst onto the scene with the release of her debut EP Exit In Darkness which was produced in collaboration with Japanese post-rockers MONO and released in 2019.
Forever Blue is her follow-up eight track mini album and it’s great.
Williams made her stage debut in early 2019 and in less than a year she was headlining in front of a sold-out audience at London’s prestigious Southbank Centre.
A.A. Williams blends a glorious mix of genres together in a delightful swirl of melodies and moods that shift from the serene to the powerful, often in the one song.
She has a wonderful voice that excels and delights in soaring melodies.
She’s also a talented multi-instrumentalist playing guitar, piano, and cello.
In compiling the track list for the album Williams left the title song off the finished product.
She explains that, although it didn’t make the final cut the song title encapsulated the overall feeling of the album.
That feeling or mood is one of reflection on the anxieties and addictions of love.
Forever Blue is a slow and haunting therapy session reflecting on the pain of a broken heart.
Although most of the songs are slow and deliberate dissections of love beginning and failing the album is by no means a mournful dirge.
There’s colour and energy and even a little bit of death metal appears in the track Fearless where Williams is joined on vocals by Johannes Persson from Cult Of Luna who adds his deep growl.
Williams described it like “the sound of tectonic plates moving”.
Persson isn’t the only metal performer to appear on the disc, Fredrik Kihlberg, also from Cult Of Luna, joins her on Glimmer and Tom Fleming (ex-Wild Beasts) plays on Dirt.
A.A. Williams’ studied classical music from the age of six but as a teenager fell in love with the music of Deaftones and after them “all things heavy” so including heavy metal in her mix of dreamy/sad songs is not so surprising.
Williams has released a new album of songs recorded in isolation, I’ll bring it to you in the coming weeks.
