FEATURE:
Revisiting...
Lady Blackbird – Black Acid Soul
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PERHAPS an artist…
most people do not know about, Lady Blackbird has already been compared with legendary Soul and Jazz singers like Nina Simone. Her debut album, Black Acid Soul, was released last year. You can get it here…but I wanted to introduce the incredible moniker of Marley Munroe. One of the best albums of last year, I feel many people have not heard it. Black Acid Soul definitely did not get a great deal of coverage from big music magazines and websites. The reviews that there are available are hugely positive! The conviction and command of Lady Blackbird’s voice makes every song seem so powerful and urgent. You will be struck and moved by Black Acid Soul the first time you hear it. When you come back, you will still be transfixed and stunned. Jazz Revelations interviewed Lady Blackbird in October 2020:
“If you haven’t already heard of Lady Blackbird, you’ll know her name soon. The LA-based vocalist is making the jazz and music community turn their collective heads with her distinguisably powerful and raw vocals. Thinking about the success and attention she’s had so far, Lady Blackbird (Marley Munroe) jubilantly exclaims “It’s been amazing! It’s been such a long road and process”.
There’s been some pretty remarkable influences and parallels drawn to Lady Blackbird, with Gilles Peterson labelling her “the Grace Jones of Jazz” and others pointing towards Amy Winehouse as well as many more timeless vocalists. Hearing these names and comparisons, she pensively comments that “they shock me ever time. They make me so happy…some of these people are my biggest influences. So, it’s your fantasy and dream to be like them. To have my name with theirs in the same sentence is remarkable”.
Before starting her career as Lady Blackbird, Marley Munroe trod an utterly different musical path. The vocalist's past career saw her exploring the realms of alt-rock and alternative music before finding her new jazz-tinged calling as Lady Blackbird. Reminiscing about this period, she muses that “I’ve gone through different phases and styles…I don’t ever think I’ll move away from anything because it’s all in me. It’s all music. I’m a true lover of music. All these different genres shape who I am as an artist”.
It’s difficult not to compare these two very different musical incarnations, but this latest project has had the oversight of Grammy-nominated producer Chris Seefried to help guide her journey into becoming Lady Blackbird. Tracing this transition, Lady Blackbird tells me that “With this record, the idea my producer and I had was just to strip everything down, making a vulnerable, raw album. The album was designed to really showcase my voice…[So] right now, Lady Blackbird is here to stay.”
The heightened critical attention surrounding Lady Blackbird has been present ever since she dropped her debut single ‘Blackbird’ back in May, a soul-stirring song written by Nina Simone which sketches the struggles of being a black woman. Nina’s songs are notoriously difficult to cover, but Lady Blackbird's rendition is sublime. It's impossible not to be intoxicated by the vocalist's dark tones which are met with trickling keys and understated strings. Recalling her draw to the song, she tells me “I’ve known this song for years, I always knew that something needed to be done, that I wanted to do with it. But, the moment just showed itself”.
By some twist of fate, the song happened to drop two days after George Floyd’s murder and the reactionary rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, giving it even more meaning in our contemporary context. “It’s disgusting” that those lyrics ring "so true about the current state,” she tells me. “Unfortunately, lyrically and what the song is about, it rolls onto everything that still goes on today. It didn’t start with recording it anything like that. It’s a beautiful piece of work that has really, always, tapped at me”.
Building up to the release of her debut album Black Acid Soul, Lady Blackbird has released a creative reimagining of the Leroy Hutson and Curtis Mayfield produced tune ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ by The Krystal Generation. “When we approached the song, I knew I liked it, but we thought… ‘what are we going to do with it?’ How are we going to turn it into what we need?’” she tells me. “We started transforming this whole song. We slowed it completely down, we changed gender. We kind of did our own take on it”. The result of this experimentation was ‘Beware the Stranger’, another tender song which crescendos and builds throughout, climaxing with a bold choir-inspired outro”.
It is exciting to see what comes next from an American artist with limitless potential. Possessing a voice that astonishing and experienced, I think she will continue to wow fans and critics alike. I hope more people pick this album up. This is what The Guardian observed in their review:
“From the title, you might think you know what to expect from LA musician Marley Munroe’s debut album as Lady Blackbird. It conjures up thoughts of Hendrix-ish guitars, P-Funk grandiloquence, Afrofuturism. But the old one about judging a book by its cover remains as true as ever.
There are moments of intensity here: rumbling drums and cinematic strings underpin her version of the James Gang’s Collage; the title track, a self-styled “Jackson Pollock jam”, is certainly atmospheric, closing the record with mantric massed vocals, lo-fi organ and an echoing percussive clatter that faintly recalls the sound of Dr John’s Gris-Gris.
But for the most part, Black Acid Soul is musically understated, stark and rooted in jazz: bass, piano or guitar, occasional drums and Munroe’s extraordinary voice, devoid of affectation, filled with ease and growling power. It’s all you need: whether she’s essaying an impossibly beautiful version of Tim Hardin’s It’ll Never Happen Again, performing producer Chris Seefried’s ballad Nobody’s Sweetheart or turning the Voices of East Harlem’s exuberant funk track Wanted Dead or Alive on its head – reworking it as a sparse, eerie ballad called Beware the Stranger – the results are utterly haunting.
Before she became Lady Blackbird, Munroe tried her hand at alt-rock and R&B: listening to Black Acid Soul, you’re struck by the sense of an artist who’s finally found her calling. It takes serious cojones to take on Nina Simone’s Blackbird, but her version is raw and sublime. Maybe the “acid” in the title makes perfect sense after all: these are songs and performances that burn deep into you”.
I will finish off with Loud and Quiet’s take on an album that deserves to be heard by as many people as is possible. It announced an artist who is primed to become a legend. Lady Blackbird already sounds like a legend. Just watcher grow and fly:
“There is very little about Black Acid Soul that is identifiably 2021, nor any other year. Marley Munroe, the woman behind the Lady Blackbird moniker, announces her arrival with a debut album that is difficult to believe is not the culmination of a six-decade career, such is the depth of wisdom, expression and control in her voice.
Coming nominally from a jazz background, this album does not belong to a genre, but to a singer with the scope to oversee where different genres meet. She takes a set of eleven tracks – seven of them cover versions – and finds truths that apply to her, so that in turn they may apply to us too. ‘Beware the Stranger’ is a version of a 1973 track by The Voices of East Harlem, and while Munroe’s version channels just a taste of the song’s gospel funk roots with its choral backing, all accompaniment is powerless in the shadow of Lady Blackbird’s towering vocal. ‘Collage’, meanwhile, is a track with a rock history (penned in 1969 by the James Gang) and yes, there is a driving momentum to this arrangement that points to where Munroe could move in the future should such conventions be of interest to her, but what is clear is she will not be knocked off course before she has even begun.
It is not just that Munroe has a powerful vocal, or that she can convey great, centuries-old pain and struggle, but that she can eke out nuance from every turn of phrase; it is often possible to read her delivery of a single word in multiple ways, she layers such meaning into her performance. Munroe realises that there is more to be said by someone who can tear the house down with ease, when they choose not to”.
If you have not heard of Lady Blackbird or Black Acid Soul, then you really need to do so. Her debut album gained widespread acclaim, but it was still not given all of the exposure and love that it should have. It is an album that I can thoroughly recommend and suggest everyone…
LISTENS to.