What were you doing at sixteen? Me, I was still trashing the local youth club with an arsenal of ping-pong balls, marker-pens and silly string and bashing out the occasional rhyme on my Les Paul re-production on the rare occasion I wasn’t busy bashing around at something else. Concerns infrequently drifted to serious matters. Spots, mood-swings and making sure I looked good in my ¾-length snow washed stretch jeans, espadrilles and pink t-shirt (always an uphill struggle) was about as complex as it got and getting to sing out loud seldom earned an audience outside of the bathroom mirror. So having the sixteen-year-old, Sonya Kitchell wrap her extraordinary, dusky alto around a box of soft, understated and largely acoustic, tissue-like compositions of such precocious, able-bodied wisdom they could qualify for a free bus-pass and help with their winter-fuel bills is something of a downer for cruel, bitter misanthropes like me. But there’s two-sides to everything, isn’t there? Sure, it could piss you off; the purring, schmaltzy jazz, the heartfelt sophistication, the smooth, professional sessioning, the lack of imperfections, and the smart, savvy wordplay from someone who, not too long ago, was making her very first gurgling noises and responding to simple commands, but the pure, unfussy pleasure of songs like ‘Tinted Glass’ with its blithe ‘Bacharach-inspired’ spirit and the soaring, enchanted, ‘Jerry’ is like having a deep, inspiring massage in an area not too far removed from your own testicles.
It’s inevitable that hacks like me are going to squeeze out the usual stiffy of like-minded songstresses; Norah Jones, Corinne Bailey Rae, Amy Winehouse, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Billie Holiday but there’s something a little more difficult to define going on here; something that extends beyond the cocktail lounge and into the more magical orbits of Beth Orton, Laura Veirs, Carole King, and Kathryn Williams, perhaps owing in no small part to the album’s witty, observational bent and a sharpness beyond her years.
Already hailed by the LA Times as a ‘fascinating performer’ Kitchell has penned a warm and enviable debut that should vault all your usual defences in one graceful, well-balanced leap. In short; as deeply reviving, and providing no less cold a comfort than a Starbucks Frappuccino.
You might not enjoy a coffee, you might loathe the Starbucks brand, but you might enjoy a cup of Kitchell.