She’s rightfully lauded as the next mainstream soul star, with evident echoes of Adele and Amy Winehouse, and while the 26-year-old British-Jamaican has all those attributes, there’s also an edge in this hugely powerful debut. Clocking in at 78 minutes across 21 songs, you’d expect more of a banger to open, but the first two are confidently, quiet – just the voice, piano and faint strings, designed to deflect expectations, not only musically, but also in message, with Ideal Woman’s killer line: “Please don’t mistake me for somebody who cares.” With that lone violin and piano, and a voice with much more power to come, here quietly pure with just a hint of grit in it, second song Strange contains that wonderful melancholy circularity: “Isn’t it strange how people can change from strangers to friends, friends into lover and strangers again.” If the style is at all familiar, it’s Celeste’s co-writer Jamie Hartman, collaborator with many commercially successfully singers, who, for example, penned among other big hits, Rag’n’Bone Man’s Human.
The next three songs up the pace with drums and horns, summoning classic soul sounds, from Tonight Tonight, Stop This Flame, which as her tone becomes bigger and wider, very much fits the Adele mould, as also with Tell Me Something I Don’t Know. After this there’s a contrast of loud and quiet, light and shade, and of those the title track, and Love Is Back, which very much as that Winehouse / Ronson 60s soul class. A Little Love, which was already used in the 2020 John Lewis Christmas ad, and even mimics a little bit of the cheesier sound of Louise Armstrong, but for all the familiarity with established sounds and production values, this is a still a huge confident, classy debut that never truly settles into the coffee table book mould, even though Celeste Epiphany Waite could well be set for global stardom. Out on Polydor.
Not Your Muse
Feel free to also check out our favourite albums of 2020 here:
Fiona Apple to Lianne La Havas to Yves Tumor: favourite albums of 2020 – Part 1
Agnes Obel to Bob Dylan, Phoebe Bridgers to Sault: favourite albums of 2020 – Part 2
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