Mucho ha cambiado en los cinco años transcurridos desde la última vez que Michael Kiwanuka lanzó un disco. Against the backdrop of the pandemic and a string of prime ministers passing through his native UK, Kiwanuka has faced tectonic shifts in his personal life. Después de grabar el premio Mercury Kiwanuka el guardián. «Tienes que saber quién eres».
Cambio Amor y odio y Kiwanuka. Es un álbum más tranquilo y seguro; Kiwanuka seems less interested in topping the charts than in creating a refuge from the noise of modern life, a fixed point around which everything else can continue to spin. Equipped with a more stripped-down palette, he sounds for the first time like a man floating above the world rather than one attempting to struggle through it.
Sin duda, el ambiente aquí es más tenue. “Floating Parade,” the name of the opening track, could work just as well as a subtitle for the record at large. The songs drift by like so many balloons in a dreamlike procession, buoyed by soft synths and tumbling drums. Spectral background vocals shadow Kiwanuka's warm baritone through the ether. There's a koan-like simplicity to the lyrical fragments he breathes like incantations over the album's spacey arrangements. “Do small changes/Ever last now/Or bemoan in my head?” Kiwanuka canta en la canción principal.
Kiwanuka likewise seems uninterested in forcing anything too spectacular to happen on any of these tunes, as if he looked around at the piles of accolades that followed his last few albums and decided not to risk pulling a muscle. La mayoría de las canciones permanecen a fuego lento. The closest he comes to swinging for the bleachers is with the two-part centerpiece “Lowdown,” which imagines a forlorn Kiwanuka sleepwalking through an alien cityscape, gawked at by locals, ending with an extended instrumental reminiscent of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond. «
A veces parece que falta algo Pequeños cambios. Hay pocos de los solos de bravura o ganchos paralizantes que animaron gran parte del trabajo reciente de Kiwanuka. Ciertamente no hay nada como “Cold Little Heart”, el éxito asombrosamente pegadizo que HBO adquirió por Grandes pequeñas mentiras Amor y odio a la cima de las listas del Reino Unido. But Kiwanuka seems content to work in an uncharacteristically understated mode, and that's part of the pleasure of Pequeños cambios. It's a record that gives the impression of an artist knowing who he is—and being happy with what he's made.
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