Kimbra: A Reckoning (digital outlets)

 |   |  1 min read

Kimbra: A Reckoning (digital outlets)

Pop may be mostly about instant gratification but it can also be surprisingly enduring. Gotye and Kimbra's Grammy-winning Somebody That I Used To Know is more than 10 years old, however her vocal as the emotional pivot remains compelling even now.

Somebody wasn't the first, nor the last, recognition for her flexible voice and sophisticated songwriting (she's won seven music awards in this country) but it gave her a platform and opportunities.

She used them to move further from the mainstream into ambitious art-pop on 2018's Primal Heart, some of it influenced by trips to East Africa working with an organisation helping women and children with HIV.

At heart she was still a pop artist, but of a more mature, less instant gratification, kind.

While fourth album A Reckoning sometimes extends her range and delivers impressive sonic breadth – the opener Save Me a slow, unguarded acknowledgement of fragility – much of it reverts to R'n'B and hip-hop tropes

GLT with rapper Erick the Architect offers familiar feminist assertion with tough/vulnerable ambiguity; Personal Space equally cliched (“I need my time on my own just to be my own best friend”); Replay, Gun and the banal New Habit (the latter sold by her urgent delivery) are jerky electro-pop underpinned by off-kilter beats. The more experimental La type with Tommy Raps and Pink Siifu is a collision of competing ideas.

Some of these are older pieces Kimbra rediscovered during the Covid years and although A Reckoning includes fine songs (the slower Foolish Thinking and I Don't Want to Fight) it feels more collated than coherent.

And not especially enduring.

.

You can hear this album at Spotify here


Share It

Your Comments

post a comment

More from this section   Music at Elsewhere articles index

The Green Pajamas: Summer of Lust (Green Monkey)

The Green Pajamas: Summer of Lust (Green Monkey)

Green Pajamas out of Seattle are one of the great, if largely ignored, pysch-pop band (think Rubber Soul/Revolver) and at last they have got around to releasing . . . their debut album?... > Read more

Ian McLagan: United States (Yep Roc/Southbound)

Ian McLagan: United States (Yep Roc/Southbound)

Many years ago it was my great pleasure to spend a bit of time with keyboard player Ian McLagan when he was in Auckland playing with an artist whom I have forgotten. McLagan -- who was, in the... > Read more

Elsewhere at Elsewhere

Young Marble Giants: Colossal Youth (1980)

Young Marble Giants: Colossal Youth (1980)

Just as Dylan emerged in the middle of the day-glo psychedelic era on a quieter rural route with John Wesley Harding, and the Cowboy Junkies whispered their way to the foreground amidst the... > Read more

HENRY ROLLINS INTERVIEWED (1990): Volume and vehemence

HENRY ROLLINS INTERVIEWED (1990): Volume and vehemence

It’s the handshake which takes you aback first – a real knuckle-crushing pressure grip which Henry Rollins delivers impressively as his eyebrows level and his gaze hardens. On a first... > Read more