| | Smoke City was a British trip-hop group whose singer Nina Miranda's Brazilian origins lent a great deal of carnaval flavor to their music. She often sings in English, French, and Portuguese all in the same song, "Latin" rhythms abound, and they like to throw in all kinds of unexpected percussion and nature sounds, not to mention a constant variety of various live instruments. The result it something quite a bit more sultry and yet more peppy than anything you usually encounter in the trip-hop vein.
Most of the tracks on "flying away," in fact, really do fly away, going off into strange meandering riffs with Miranda sort of cooing and skatting away multilingually for long minutes at a time. Sometimes it's fun, and sometimes it sounds like they don't really know what they're doing, or they're just playing around and happened to be recording it.
The largest sonic problem this casual approach creates is when Miranda lets herself lapse into a flat, atonal sing-song, which doesn't do her voice or the listener any favors. This happens very frequently, particularly over most of the second half of the album.
Her most focused efforts come at the beginning, starting with the long, sultry opening track, "Underwater Love," and particularly in the lilting third track, "With You." In these songs the band establishes a solid rhythm and sticks to it, while Nina keeps her voice in a much more flattering lower tone, or a gentle cooing. I should also add that she tend to do better when singing in Portuguese than in English--not that her English sounds anything other than native, but the Portuguese just seems to inspire her a little more. And it is, at least in her mouth, a very beautiful language.
Even those two tracks, however, wander somewhat in their extended later minutes. The album as a whole is fun and fresh, with some genuinely lush moments, but also uneven and unpolished. It took me a couple listens to get past the rough edges, and I still can't say I'm satisfied that it succeeds as a cohesive album, but the good certainly outweighs the bad--and where else are you likely to get to hear a lovely lady cooing at you in Portuguese? |
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