Sonya Kitchell’s ‘Conviction’: guilty of enchantment
“CONVICT OF CONVICTION,” Sonya Kitchell (429 Records)
Former teen jazz phenom Sonya Kitchell emerges from a two-year hiatus of releases with the new “Convict of Conviction,” a convincing return that so effectively exemplifies the power of understatement, Kitchell only needed six tracks to create a fully satisfying experience.
The 21-year-old native of Massachusetts is gifted with a near-preternatural voice, rich and honeyed. She complements her delivery with evocative lyrics and deft play at piano and guitar. And though she makes a complete package on her own, she gets added lift from string arrangements and bass by Garth Stevenson plus sleek production from Stewart Lerman.
“Convict of Conviction” opens with its title track, gorgeously constructed, yet all the stylized elements fade in the shadow of Kitchell’s expressive sophistication as she sings lines such as, “Nobody likes to feel powerless.”
All tracks might be adequately described as jazz, but the cuts are nuanced to set them apart and yet keep them compatible with one overriding atmosphere. The chamber-pop “Lighthouse” is replete with urbane sensuality (including an account of toe kissing), and the blues-inflected “Mr. Suicidal” creates discrete drama and intrigue in a Gothic, dark-cabaret context that launches into a beautiful crescendo of harmony.
“Convict of Conviction” loses a little something at the end with more traditional cuts “Snowing” and “Gypsy Eyes” — the former both regal and stately, the later grandiose and theatrical — but the track immediately preceding those, “Sinks Like a Stone,” compensates.
On that EP highlight, Kitchell finds herself a stunned captive to attraction, conveying helplessness through hushed yelps and raspy resignation, creating chills with lines about, “a feeling slipping down my spine.” With piano, bass and brushed rhythm casting a spell, she wonders, “How did you find me, get deep inside me?”
She’s likely to get deep inside her listeners with that song alone.
Rating (five possible): 4
‘Ananesworld’ jaunts, bumps, then grinds
“ANANESWORLD,” Anane (Nervous)
Anane offers a genuine dance-club experience with “Ananesworld,” for better and worse.
Just as it takes a really great song to get most folks on the floor, the singer opens her release with an attention-grabbing cover of Yoko Ono’s “Walking on Thin Ice,” a spirited and sultry version blending propulsive disco and spicy ’80s synth-pop.
From there, the singer from Cape Verde (off Africa’s west coast) offers adequate rhythms to keep her adrenalin-pumped audience moving — a “Plastic People” that ties elements of Grace Jones, jam-band music and New Wave; the ethereal reggae cut “Rock the Cradle”; and the rolling electro-jazz epic tandem of “Terra Longe” and “Bem Ma Mi” that hypnotize with Anane’s hot ecstasy.
Generally only the most enthusiastic dancers stick around for more than a few songs after that initial pull to the floor, and Anane’s bait likewise dries up as mid-album cuts “Bigger Than Life,” “My Sexy Way” and “A New Born Day” are little more than an assembly of seductive coos and sighs, throwaway cuts that might have been rejected by one of Prince’s protegees.
After that sag in momentum, “Ananesworld” makes one great pitch to reinvigorate her audience — an irresistibly funk-ified cover of Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” pitting Anane’s wiles against the penetrating resonance of Roberto Cavalli’s guest vocals.
But from there the release’s drop-off is so steep that Anane seems to be deliberately running off listeners with a series of songs (“Standing in Line,” “Let Me Love You,” “Let’s Get High (Life Love Music)”) in which each track is more cheesy than its predecessor.
Anyone still lingering for the bloated closer, an 8-plus-minute “One Dream,” will be enervated by the pointlessness of its extended, rambling drum roll. Anane herself seems to have barely a cameo role before even she disappears.
And if she’s not hanging around, why should you?
Rating: 3
Nick Thune’s tunes are incidental
“THICK NOON,” Nick Thune (Comedy Central)
When Nick Thune saunters out on stage with a guitar, you might think, “Oh great, another comic who thinks he’s a musician.” But it turns out he mostly uses it for ambient sound on “Thick Noon,” a combination CD/DVD.
The instrument is a great prop for Thune, a 30-year-old Seattle-native comic who strums out a cadence for a series of short bits and one-or-so-liners at the beginning of both the CD and the stage-show part of the DVD.
He delivers gems such as, “Life Savers only work if you’re a diabetic” and “Don’t you wish that somebody would open up a restaurant and name it I Don’t Care so you could finally go to the place your wife is always talking about?”
He puts away the guitar for a while to relay more extended tales, including a droll reading from a timeline he kept of a stoned friend who measured his legs because he thought the left was shorter than the right, ate an uncooked-spaghetti-noodle sandwich, went looking for a CD in his car without remembering he doesn’t have a car and tried to bake cookies out of the cookie-dough balls in ice cream.
Thune then dishes out more fully realized arrangements with the help of slide guitarist Kyle Moseby, telling one story about falling in love in a chat forum and another about saving the day by doing a back flip.
The stage part of the CD ends too soon, and the disc goes into a terrible tailspin of songs that are neither funny nor musical. If they had been eliminated in favor of more stage material, “Thick Noon” would have been stellar.
At least the DVD puts those songs in perspective as they play out in context of a series of generally funny short films about such topics as looking for a lost, pregnant dog and Thune’s inability to cook a live lobster.
The DVD also features his dynamic stage show (which aired on Comedy Central) and, unfortunately, segments for a rote faux-reality “Nick’s Big Show.”
For sure Thune’s a versatile entertainer, but “Thick Noon” also reveals a few weaknesses.
Rating: 3-1/2
© 2010, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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