Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By Adia Victoria, Atlantic Records 2019.
Wow this girl is good!
Silences is Adia Victoria’s second album following on from her very wel-received 2016 debut Beyond The Bloodhounds.
Adia classifies herself as a blues singer and yet Silences is as much indie rock in song structure as it is blues.
What she writes and sings about however is pure blues.
In her own words she describes her role as “putting fangs back into the blues because in my opinion it’s the original punk music. It was people singing songs about messages that they couldn’t speak because they’d be killed.”
Silences is an album that pushes boundaries, forcing us to re-imagine the blues.
It displays a heightened level of precision that takes the listener through a rollercoaster of emotions from euphoria to bleakness and comfort to wry, menacing, anxiety.
Adia’s lyrics are often spiky and direct and her vocal delivery displays a sweetness that is often at odds with the edginess of the musical backing.
In The City her breathy phrasing weaves through a wheezing concoction of hip hop beats, burbling synths, and thrashing drums while in Cry Wolf the lyrics take on a chilling undertone with its drifting haze of electronic noise and lurching beat constantly unsettling the listener.
There are familiar blues elements in the album but it is what she does with them that stands her work apart from those who pay much more reverential and conservative homage.
Instead of building towards the standard blues technique of cathartic build up and release in Dope Queen Blues she increases the tension and anxiety with her fidgety phrasing over metronomic percussion and punchy piano.
Adia co-produced the album with Aaron Dessner of post punk band The National.
Together they’ve composed one of the most interesting albums I’ve heard in a long time.
It may upset blues traditionists but I suspect that is part of the plan.
What she’s done is to go back to the driving force behind the blues. To explore the emotional urgency and rawness that gives authenticity and drives the music.
To do this she’s combined spiky poetics with chilly electronic soundscapes, moody orchestrations, and indie rock edginess to produce a new take on an old musical form.
