Nadya Albertsson’s ‘Half Silk Half Blade’: Sprawling, Aspirational, and Occasionally Brilliant (review)

What would sound if an artist cross-pollinated the golden-hour music of Cleo Sol and the jazzy, buoyant breakdowns of Mac Miller’s legendary keyboard logic?  Swedish Nadya Albertsson’s debut release Half Silk Half Blade – recorded between Berlin and Glasgow – catches the tide of spiritual-pop hype that’s been popularized by singer-songwriters in recent years. ‘This is a woman’s intuition,’ she proclaims on the title track, a line that doubles as a fitting thesis for the album itself: at times a peripheral outskirt study of turning the hemlessness of spiritual flow into musical translation and at others, and at others punctured clean through by precise genre-blending clairvoyance.

Rather than leaning on familiar album structure – front-loading the stickiest moments before cooling off into a shakier middle – Nadya opens the record by circling the edges of her most direct material, seemingly comfortable with not yet having fully articulated what she’s trying to say.  The early tracks feel exploratory, even a little untethered instrumentally, as if the songs are still deciding where to land.  ‘Never Know (IDKWTS)’ offers, ‘I don’t mind a little worship’ (we’re listening): it’s layered yet weightless, ceremonially draped over ascendant trumpets and tranquilizing synths before pivoting inward – from distant, ritualistic abstraction to dry and desaturated R&B stylings.  

Yet, the most focused and trained skill in opening tracks like ‘Never Know’ and ‘Please Please Please’ is doubtlessly Nadya’s built-for-soul powerhouse voice.  Leading the genre switches with a deftness and control rare for a debut record, her voice spans an impressive breadth of capabilities: whether misting over alongside the cloudy trombone notes central to jazz vocalics, spiraling alongside keyboard declensions, or allowing her voice to take center in its soul-pop aspirations.

While a song doesn’t necessarily have to be sewn together note by note to land, the midway three-track run lands with the most precision.  Dreamy pop track ‘Pretender’, perhaps the most precise track on the record, and perhaps most possessing the ability to equally balance coherence and experimentation.  It’s not overly familiar structurally, but it does manage to pin down a coveted orchestral integrity: countless threads and riff-offs, none overtly frivolous, and all ultimately pushing forward towards the aspirational final note glow where all the previous moments click into residuality. 

Similar praise can be given to the following track ‘Swaying’, a swaggering and leaden-bass expansion upon the playful and snappy exclamations of ‘Pretender’, leaving behind the meandering harmonies of the earlier tracks for something more playful and alive: it’s still inherently contemplative, but in one of the least self-serious forms yet surfaced on the album.

‘Weak Knees’ shows crisp yet expansive creative vision executed right in the sweet spot between invention and clear musical thesis, and is perhaps the only moment in the record that sounds equally inspired by art-pop tightness and the more laissez-faire attitudes of jazz. 

Closing track ‘New Relations’ lands in a similar sweet spot.  Nearly every instrument carries itself with a decisive uprightness – again, somewhat of a one-off from the constant resonance variety throughout the rest of the record.  It’s the most decisively neo-soul track, saturating plucky wavelengthed bass and start-stop vocal techniques of R&B.

I don’t envy anybody who feels their musical calling is to make a jazz-pop record.  The genre’s very mechanics work against it: jazz wants to sprawl, surprise, and shapeshift, while pop demands thesis, memorability, and a clean spine to hang everything on. 

At its clearest moments, the record establishes Nadya as potentially being able to penetrate the ranks of silk-smooth postmodern jazz projects; and, even at moments where the intention of a track might at times be difficult to pin down, a debut record crowded with too many good ideas to all be noticed certainly intrigues more than a project with needless infrastructure built around protecting a mere few.

Half Silk Half Blade is out now on Rebecca’s Records

Main image credit: Harrison Reid