Jamie Lidell: Compass
This guy. Now this guy can sing.
I've been meaning to write up Jamie Lidell's latest album Compass for a couple of weeks now, and I've finally managed to take the damn thing off repeat so I can sit down and do exactly that.
This is by far the biggest, gutsiest album the British soul singer has released to date. It stomps all over his previous (and also fantastic) albums, the sweet Motown sound of 2008's Jim and the more playful funk of his first album Multiply. The amount of genres fed into this work is astounding, yet Lidell manages to pull them all together in his experimental jam session sort of way. He swings with ease from raw, bassy beat-boxing rhythms in Completely Exposed to channelling the smoothest of Prince-like vocals in She Needs Me and It's a Kiss, and offering up one of the most stripped down, perfect soul songs I've heard in a while with I Can Love Again. You can sort of tell when a singer has found the love of his life and then written an album, can't you?
He collaborated with a handful of musicians to produce the album including Feist, Chris Taylor (of Grizzly Bear) and most notably Beck, whose swampy blues sounds and eerie harmonies are clearly evident in some of the tracks. Even if Compass seems entirely genre-bending though, it is Lidell's incredible, warm voice that knots the album together.
The video for the title track The Ring is hilarious, and within the first 5 seconds of watching/listening I was pre-ordering the album. Lidell is a man slowly going mad on a beach searching for the ring that belonged to a woman he's not even sure existed. Tough day.
And please, for the love of god, watch this video. Jamie and his mates walk around the streets of Paris banging out tunes on all matter of improvised instruments. It's positively heart-warming. At least watch until the kid tries to kick a football into their giant cowbell.
A little odd, a little brilliant.
E.
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