Hyperallergic Reviews New Jamila Woods Album

Lucas Fagen gives a close listen to Jamila Woods's Legacy! Legacy!, an album in which every song celebrates "a Black culture hero (“Baldwin,” “Zora,” “Miles,” etc)," he explains, "songs that capture how life is informed by history—art history." More, from there: 

An established poet and community organizer, Woods first emerged as a musician as one half of M&O, her folk-soul collaboration with Owen Hill, with whom she defined a hushed, gentle sensibility informed by acoustic bedroom pop and children’s music.

She broke through when she sang the chorus on Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment’s “Sunday Candy,” a hit largely thanks to her voice: friendly, pungent, delighted, with a sharp nasal edge that adds a skeptical observer’s distance to what might otherwise sound one-dimensionally positive and affirming.

Her first solo album, Heavn (2016), mixed political protest with quiet contemplation, a musical rendition of Chicago that presented the city as an intimate playground and a site for private introspection.

The album’s sparkly neosoul was crisper and more electric than her previous music, yet still tender, blending the glassy keyboards, echoing percussion, and bubbly xylophones into a sort of R&B pastoral, as bracing and restorative as Lake Michigan (“You gotta love me like I love the lake,” she sang on “LSD”). “Lonely” captures her approach: a floaty, midtempo ballad, it sounds vaporous on first listen, and then you notice the metallic clunk of the drums, the lovely mournful electronic organ hook, the gingery tang in her voice as she sings “Don’t take from me my quiet/don’t take from me my tears/don’t take from me my trials/don’t take from me my fears.”

Read more at Hyperallergic.