Kitty Empire 

My Brightest Diamond: This Is My Hand review – operatic cult star’s most accessible album yet

Nothing else comes close to the fantastic Pressure, but left-field singer Shara Worden’s latest is funky and dynamic, writes Kitty Empire
  
  

My Brightest Diamond, CD of the week
My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden, whose voice has a ‘crystalline elasticity’. Photograph: PR

Butterfly-voiced and art-minded, My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden has, thus far, been a familiar name to a limited coterie of left-field pop fans. One song on her latest album – the Detroit-based singer’s fourth – could change all that, though. Pressure is one of those songs that stops you in your tracks, so jaw-dropping is the clash between your preconceptions and the sound coming into your ears.

It starts with a marching band drum roll, one that relocates to Brazil. A brassy hook comes in, having seemingly been liberated from some A-list R&B producer’s hard drive. Worden’s vocals float through, describing how geological pressure creates diamonds. “I feel the weight of a billion years come down on me,” she sings. There’s a jazz swing to her vocal, and a funky bassline. Things intensify. Human parallels are drawn: great stress can create greatness.

Then we peak. “Disperse the white light!” she commands , and a rave shakedown, not a million miles from the Knife, ensues. It’s pretty brilliant. With the right sync or remix, Pressure could go places. A worthy addition to the canon of songs about diamonds (via Marilyn Monroe, Liza Minnelli, Kanye West and Rihanna), it is also unlike anything Worden has released before. This Is My Hand, Worden’s most accessible album by some distance, finds this opera-trained singer embracing the debased idiom of pop.

Worden has come to some renown through indie mystic Sufjan Stevens’s family of collaborators; her albums are released on his label. You could compare Worden to Annie “St Vincent” Clark, another veteran of Stevens’s marching bands and collaborator of David Byrne’s. But unlike St Vincent, Worden lacks a grounding in hard rock. There is a vein of female pop with which Worden shares some DNA – the operatic Zola Jesus, Fiona Apple, Regina Spektor – but the last time the UK saw Worden, the singer was in classical mode, performing in Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins, at London’s Royal Festival Hall, part of 2013’s The Rest Is Noise festival.

Up until now, My Brightest Diamond songs have been cerebral and emotive, but lacking in groove – chamber pop about Obama’s inaugural speech, or self-reflexive tracks about fear. “Sh-sh-sh-Shara, this is going to hurt,” ran 2011’s Be Brave, which found Worden looking scary in face paint. “Be changed, or be undone.” She changed, and it could be the making of her. Lady Gaga even inspired one chord progression on this latest album.

Of course, it’s all relative. This Is My Hand remains ferociously arty. The ideas for this album grew out of a scatologically frank cine-opera called River of Fundament, by composer Jonathan Bepler and Matthew Barney, in which Worden performed. Jared Diamond’s study, The Third Chimpanzee, made Worden think about pre-linguistic sound-making. “Oohs” and “beeps”, Worden argues on Before the Words, are just as important as words. Unfortunately, the song itself is far too wordy to make the point. It may be news to Worden, but rock’n’roll actually got here first with its “ramalama”s and “woah-oh-oh”s.

Elsewhere, she fares better at de-evolving her art. With its brass runs, Lover Killer has internalised the dynamic lessons of dance-pop; there is a seriously funky pre-chorus and a billowy pop denouement. I Am Not the Bad Guy combines a naggingly straightforward riff and building intensity with chamber pop arrangements in the second half.

Ultimately, nothing on This Is My Hand gives you an irregular heartbeat quite like Pressure. But these intense songs, sung with a crystalline elasticity, have located the mojo previously absent from My Brightest Diamond’s art.

 

Leave a Comment

Required fields are marked *

*

*