Leila Adu has been described as a “Nina Simone for the noughties”, and compared by critics to artists as diverse as Bjork, Ute Lempe, PJ Harvey, Stereolab, Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell, Astrud Gilberto, Fiona Apple, Kate Bush, Sandy Denny & Nico; and whilst there is legitimate mileage in each of these parallels, it's obvious that this a collective grasping for a female artist who is equally uncategorisable and uncompromising. (She jokes on her myspace page that she was pleased to finally be compared to a man when Mark Braby likened her to Tim Buckley - a more accurate reference point than most of the above...)
London-born with a heritage both European and Ghanaian, Leila was brought up in New Zealand. She has appeared with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and produced two acclaimed albums ('Dig A Hole' & 'Cherry Pie'), which led to national tours in Australia, Indonesia, U.K. and Russia. She is now based in Rome...
These early albums heard her evolving a style centered around her astonishing voice and her potent, percussive yet fluid piano playing (there is some substance in that Nina Simone comparison...), but with a supporting sound-world courtesy of some of New Zealand's finest musicians, and infusing a broadly 'art-rock' approach with elements of torch song, speakeasy blues, avant garde jazz, gamelan, the post-rock textures of Slint and Tortoise, and a David Lynch style dreamlike b-movie melodrama. As her website has it, exploring the "dissonant edges of familiar forms", but with that kind of 'dissonance' that they once accused Thelonious Monk or Debussy of, the kind that soon betrays it's own compelling melodic and harmonic logic to the attentive listener...
'Dark Joan', Leila's third album as a solo artist, and her first to get the Frizz Records vinyl blessing, was recorded in Chicago with the legendary Steve Albini (PJ Harvey, Joanna Newsome, Nirvana, Pixies), and Albini's genius has been to strip her sound back to it's essence, and hold it's most distinctive qualities up to the light, without losing anything of the sophistication or imagination of the first two LPs. It doesn't hurt that this is by far Leila's most powerful set of songs to date, and if anything we are lead even deeper into her world by the pictures painted with just piano (or in some cases harpsichord or a grime-encrusted electric piano) and that voice...
We should focus in a little on that voice... Capable of anything from delicate heartbreaking purity to a fearsome dramatic power, often within the scope of a single line (Nina again...), she hypnotises the listener into submission as soon as she opens her mouth. She has been described as sounding like "hot treacle on broken glass", and you can hear why; but she can equally well do hot treacle on it's own, or just broken glass, or unbroken glass, or the sound that broke the glass in the first place and knocked the treacle off the stove... Her powers are seemingly limitless, yet unlike most other singers of her calibre, never does she resort to melodrama or show-boating, or any kind of pastiche, instead she employs her resources fully in the expression of her distinctive musical vision and the deep well-spring of her imagination. Nothing ever sounds as though it could have not been sung...
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