Clairo’s Charm: lush, intricate and well-crafted.
Clairo, Charm
“Sexy to somebody, it would help me out / I need a reason to get out of the house,” Claire Cottrill sings on her third album as Clairo. On another song: “I’d rather be alone than a stranger.” That push and pull – the concurrent desire for intimacy and solitude, or, in trending parlance, anxious-avoidance – is at the heart of Charm, a mature record that captures the dialectics of growing up with the wisdom of the old world.
She may be just 25, but this era of Clairo’s music sounds and feels like it could have come from half a century ago. On this album – her first that’s been self-released – that’s thanks to co-producer Leon Michels, known for his work with iconic soul and funk band Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. Recorded to analogue tape, Charm wouldn’t sound out of place spinning on a record player, crackles and all; Clairo harnesses these vintage sensibilities to become something like a Carole King for the new generation.
It’s something of a relief after the singer-songwriter’s last album, 2021’s Sling, produced by he of pop royalty, Jack Antonoff. Antonoff’s production style has two modes – the bombastic synth-pop he’s best known for (Taylor Swift, The 1975) and moody indie (Lana Del Rey, Lorde). Sling was the latter, with a similar palette to Lorde’s sun-drenched yet strangely lukewarm Solar Power. It’s not surprising that more artists are going down this route – Swift’s twin pandemic albums, folklore and evermore, signified the beginning of a new wave of folk-tinged pop. But Sling leaned so heavily into the increasingly popular whispered aesthetic that it often felt muted and, at worst, lifeless.
A new producer may have been just the ticket. Charm finds the happy medium between Sling and the musician’s debut, 2019’s Immunity. The latter was the typical sound of Gen Z bedroom pop: fuzzy, lo-fi songs about the internal life of a young woman. Some of the songs on that record were excellent – Bags is one of the best examples of its genre – but there wasn’t much really differentiating Clairo from the rest of her ilk.
Clairo, aka Claire Cottrill: her third album finds the sweet spot between debut Immunity (2019) and Sling (2021).Credit: Lucas Creighton
On this album, Clairo continues to sing in this soft lower register and probe her inner world, but steps it up with more complex instrumentation and arrangements. The result is a lush, intricate and well-crafted blend. Brass, strings and wind instruments wind their way through the record, with piano as its grounding force, in particular the Wurlitzer keyboard, which lends a feeling of nostalgia. Clairo has been moving away from guitar – the instrument does feature, as on Nomad, Echo and closer Pier 4, but is not a driving factor on this album.
The singer’s wordless voice acts as a rhythmic device and accompanying texture, too, as on the smoky Terrapin, and at the beginning of Second Nature, which also uses laughter as an instrument. That track is a particular highlight for the way it plays with structure – halfway through, it switches up completely, adopting a waltz-like rhythm before sliding back into its original form and departing with a charming clarinet outro.
There are hints of psychedelia, too: the woozy Echo conjures a kaleidoscope of colour and sound, and a sudden moment where all the instrumentation drops out, leaving Clairo’s voice to sound out alone, is incredibly effective.
It all coalesces into something subtle but quietly sublime. Charm is a grower – at first it all blurred into one pleasant, long song, and I wondered if it would stick in my memory – but I’ve found myself humming snatches of its melodies, or obsessing over small sonic details. Every subsequent spin reveals something new, rewarding close and careful listening. Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
Hiatus Kaiyote, Love Heart Cheat Code
You may think you’ve never heard of Hiatus Kaiyote, but you probably have. Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and Beyonce and Jay-Z have all sampled songs from the Melbourne quartet. They’ve been up for Grammy Awards three times, becoming the first Australian group to be nominated in the R&B category. And they’ve been lauded by the likes of Erykah Badu, Questlove and the late Prince.
Hiatus Kaiyote consists of singer Nai Palm, bassist Paul Bender, keyboardist Simon Mavin, and drummer Perrin Moss.Credit: Rocket Weijers
So, apart from those in the know, how can they still be something of a cult band in their own country? Part of it probably has something to do with their genre. Or, rather, the inability to comfortably place them in any single genre. They get tagged as R&B, or progressive R&B, or neo-soul, or future soul, or funk, or jazz-funk. Suffice to say, they’re not easily categorised.
When you learn that they played their very first gig in 2011 at a masquerade ball that also featured sword swallowers, fire twirlers and gypsy death core bands, it kind of makes perfect sense. They work with odd time signatures, glitchy rhythms, loopy atmospherics and liquid instrumentation.
So, no, you can’t put Hiatus Kaiyote in a box, least of all their lead singer, Naomi Saalfield, who goes by the appropriately explosive stage name Nai Palm. Her striking appearance of tribal-meets-anime facial piercings and Egyptian-meets-Kabuki style make-up, is echoed by her gymnastic vocals, which soar, slide and swoop at unexpected moments.
The group’s last album, 2021’s Mood Valiant, was made at a particularly difficult time. For a start – the pandemic. But on top of this Saalfield was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent surgery. When the record was released it was difficult not to equate the shimmery uplift of many of the songs with a new sense of hope after enduring a dark time. “Please believe me when I say, someday it’ll be OK,” Saalfield sang on Stone And Lavender, an uncharacteristically simple piano-based ballad that found her at her most direct.
While Hiatus Kaiyote are musically as slant as ever on fourth album Love Heart Cheat Code, it does find them in a more unified state of mind. “I’m a maximalist,” Saalfield says in the album bio. “I complicate f---ing everything. But the more you go through things in life, you become more relaxed and uninhibited.”
They open proceedings with Dreamboat, which acts as a two-minute curtain-raiser and prelude for what’s to come. Inspired by visionary jazz harpist/pianist Alice Coltrane, it features twinkling piano, a crescendo of strings and the glistening tones of harpist Melina van Leeuwen, while Saalfield’s lofty vocal intones “Here I am, dreamboat, take me home.”
Lyrically, Saalfield is both reaching for the stars and seeking human connection from song to song. Telescope, which rides a ticklish rhythm and burbling bass line, was inspired by a NASA website where each band member typed in their birthday to see what the Hubble telescope photographed that day. It also cheekily borrows a line from The Temptations’ My Girl.
The following track, Make Friends, stemmed from something said by the wife of Mario Caldato, who mixed the album in LA: “You don’t make friends, you recognise them.” Saalfield uses this as the kick-off point for a meditation on friendship, set to a 12/8 jazz-rock feel.
It’s telling that a song about the simple act of walking around in a great mood while listening to music through headphones (Everything’s Beautiful), and a song about classical composer Dimitri Shostakovich, who allegedly heard atonal melodies because of shrapnel that had lodged itself in his brain (Dimitri), can both sound equally slippery, woozy and off-the-wall.
There’s no doubt that the band, which includes bassist Paul Bender, drummer Perrin Moss and keyboard player Simon Mavin, is so musically adept that it borders on the precocious.
At times you’re reminded of arguments about Steely Dan, whose fans lionise them as the ultimate in studio perfection, consummate musicians who built a bridge between jazz and rock, and detractors pillory them as bloodless muso-bores who are too clever for their own good and play too many chords.
Hiatus Kaiyote could easily start similar arguments, but Love Heart Cheat Code does find them baring more soul and exhibiting more heart, even as they continue to be intent on bending things out of shape. Barry Divola
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