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Laura Mvula.
Never self-conscious or jarring … Laura Mvula
Never self-conscious or jarring … Laura Mvula

Laura Mvula: The Dreaming Room review – vivid, original, it's the real deal

This article is more than 7 years old

The twisted, off-centre vision of Mvula’s debut, Sing to the Moon, is everywhere in this rich and seductive follow-up

In the best possible way, the rise of Laura Mvula seemed like a case of the public being sold goods under false pretences. Before her debut album, Sing to the Moon, arrived in 2013, she was touted as the latest in a profitable line of MOR singer-songwriters with a retro-soul twist, who’d been brought to attention via the BBC’s Sound of poll and the Brits critics’ choice award. A certain kind of audience was primed to expect something comfortingly familiar: articles in women’s magazines compared her voice to Nina Simone’s; the legendary home of incisive music criticism that is Hello! magazine pronounced her “the new Adele”.

What they actually got was a gospel singer with a degree in classical composition and a love of Oliver Messaien and Pierre Boulez, who’d made an album heavy on the celeste and the harp, packed with weird orchestrations and odd, meandering melodies. Sometimes they sounded like 60s sunshine pop, sometimes like gospel, and occasionally as if someone had fed the Swingle Singers a potent cocktail of hallucinogens and then shoved them into the vocal booth and told them to get on with it. In a world peppered with artists desperately trying to appear more strange and intriguing than they are – slathering the crazy outfits and kooky photoshoots over desperately ordinary music – Mvula sounded suspiciously like the real deal: someone whose curious path to success had left her with a uniquely twisted, idiosyncratic musical vision.

Watch the video for Show Me

She sounds even more like that on Sing to the Moon’s successor, an album that often resembles pop music made by someone who has almost no idea or interest in what pop is supposed to sound like. Its song structures are episodic, circuitously odd. Its arrangements have a WTF? quality. There are curious off-centre drums, almost aggressive explosions of vocal harmonies; Angel shifts from massed acapella – treated with a vocoder-like effect that gives it the feel of a mid-70s radio jingle – to a vaguely countryish guitar figure and then to a baroque harpsichord backing in the space of three minutes. Yet The Dreaming Room never feels self-conscious or jarring; it’s less like the work of someone showily disregarding the rules than an artist who never bothered to learn them in the first place.

As if to emphasise her otherness, Mvula keeps doing things other artists do – getting a rapper in for a guest verse, availing herself of the services of the ever-obliging Nile Rodgers – but doing them completely differently. Wretch 32’s cameo appearance on People, rapping against a bring-out-your-dead rhythmic thud, is hugely impressive, not least because he manages to make his point despite being liberally coated with distortion, subjected to unpredictable surges of echo and having to fight for space in the mix with a particularly dense mesh of harmony vocals. On Overcome, the genial mastermind of Chic’s trademark guitar style is used in a way that strips it of its usual buoyant euphoria: instead, it adds a relentless, twitchy nervousness.

Watch the video for Phenomenal Woman

The Dreaming Room is a rich stew. It’s vivid, cramming a lot of information into barely half an hour of music. Even the most commercial tracks are pretty odd – as evidenced by the off-kilter funk and yelped, incomprehensible chorus of the single Phenomenal Woman, Mvula’s interpretation of her grandma’s instruction to “write a song I can lift me spirits, write a song I can jig me foot” – and even the quiet moments prickle with intensity: the ostensibly straightforward piano-and-vocal section in Show Me, recorded in such a way that Mvula appears to be singing directly into your ear, the tranquil piano chords disrupted by the noise of her feet on the pedals. Lyrically, it’s preoccupied with relationship woe and black empowerment. The artist who declined to attend the Brits in protest at its woeful lack of black nominees is present on People – “our skin was a terrible thing to live in” – while there’s also a lot of raw, often harrowing stuff about Mvula’s divorce, the tracks on which she appears to come to terms with the collapse of her marriage outnumbered by those where she seems inconsolable: “I miss the wonder of a future with somebody,” she sings on Show Me’s hymn-like opening, “Oh God, where are you?”

It should be much harder work than it is. But like Joanna Newsom, Mvula pulls the listener along with her through the most serpentine songs: however winding their routes, the melodies are almost always beautiful; however much the musical scenery shifts, it is always striking. You do wonder what its commercial fate will be. Despite the discrepancy between its advance publicity and its contents, Sing to the Moon went gold, but there are moments here strange enough to make Sing to the Moon sound like the work of the new Adele by comparison. Or perhaps audiences will be seduced by The Dreaming Room’s invention and originality, which would be entirely fitting.

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