Jade Bird - Different Kinds of Light (2021) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

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Jade Bird - Different Kinds of Light (2021) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

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Is it still Americana when the artist isn't American? On her second album, British singer-songwriter Jade Bird upends the genre by weaving together country, folk, jangle-rock and even touches of Britpop. Producer Dave Cobb has worked with a slew of artists you can hear, like an audio connect-the-dots, in Bird's appealing sound: Brandi Carlile (the jagged little country-folk of "Candidate"), Amanda Shires and Jason Isbell ("Punchline" and its wide-open landscape), Elle King. (One more but whom Cobb can't claim credit for: Rosanne Cash and her excellent '80s-era country-pop stylings.) But Bird—who has said she was influenced by light-and-shade country duo Civil Wars as well as songbird queen Dolly Parton—also went to the BRIT School, the legendary London institution where Adele and Amy Winehouse got a musical education. You can hear all of the above in songs like "Now is the Time," which shimmers and shines like early Faith Hill accompanied by sunny Johnny Marr guitars. There are also Marr echoes on the excellent '90s college rock meets folk number "Trick Mirror," with Bird's voice soaring over bounding drums. "Honeymoon" struts atop a bouncy Swinging London beat; Both "I'm Getting Lost" and "Open Up the Heavens" stomp and pout, as Bird's voice soars from fragile to wailing power. On "Houdini," Bird—a child of divorce—uses the escape artist's name as an evocative metaphor "for all the people, especially the male figures, in my earlier life who came and went, without warning." At once bitter and wistful, she sings, "I'll make my day and trade your place/ With anyone who's not walkin' away again." One of the most surprising moments is "1994," a great rambler that, with its spiky and slip-sliding guitars à la Blur, sounds more like something from 1997, the year Bird was born. All of those references add up to something that feels completely fresh. © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz