Bedouine – Bedouine review: 'lushly orchestrated, literary ballads'

There’s a melancholy swagger to the album’s first half of the album, says Richard Godwin
New release: Bedouine's self titled album
Richard Godwin23 June 2017

Bedouine is the nom de microphone of Azniv Korkejian, an Armenian-extracted, Syrian-born, Saudi-raised singer-songwriter, now resident in California.

Despite a nomadic heritage, it’s the last of these locations that most informs her sound. “California city parks/They talk in excavation marks,” she observes on Back to You, one of 10 lushly orchestrated, finger-picked, literary ballads that could easily have emerged from Laurel Canyon in 1972.

(They were actually embroidered by producer Gus Seyffert at Matthew E White’s Spacebomb studio in Virginia, itself a reliable marker of quality.)

There’s a melancholy swagger to the album’s first half — One of These Days is a lilting pleasure — but the lightness of the arrangements often belies the sombre lyrics.

“I don’t want your pity, concern or scorn/I’m calmed by my lonesome, I feel right at home,” she intones on Solitary Daughter, a semi-spoken paean to female self-sufficiency sung in a breathy alto with something of Leonard Cohen’s bedsit vocabulary.

The further she ventures into this darker terrain, the more rewarding this becomes. The autumnal cadences of Mind’s Eye recall Sandy Denny, while You Kill Me seeks the same restless muse as all troubadours: “Some nights I get into the car and drive/Nowhere really could keep me satisfied.”

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